How low can you go?
4 Apr 2006 by Evoluted New Media
You may be familiar with the limbo - the skill tried, often ill advisedly, by the slightly inebriated on holiday. But a recent discovery suggests that for ants, it is a way of life
You may be familiar with the limbo - the skill tried, often ill advisedly, by the slightly inebriated on holiday. But a recent discovery suggests that for ants, it is a way of life
Scientists have discovered that ants are able to learn how to visually judge the height of horizontal barriers so that they can successfully crawl under it without slowing down.
“We found that the ants visually assessed the height of the barrier and learned how to lower their body enough to crawl under without stopping”, explains Tobias Seidl of the University of Zurich, “When the barrier was made invisible to them, they had to use their antennae to examine it.”
Desert ants generally scurry around at high speeds whilst foraging to limit their exposure to the life threatening conditions of their habitat. Climbing over or crawling beneath obstacles means that ants do not have to make large detours to go around them.
The researchers motivated the ants to run back and forth by placing biscuit crumbs flavoured with melon and tuna at one end of a channel. They observed the ants’ reaction towards a horizontal barrier placed between the food and the ants’ nest using high speed video recordings from the side.
Tobias Seidl presented his latest research findings this week to the Annual Meeting for the Society for Experimental Biology at the University of Canterbury.
