Ants That Can Count 162
thisIsOdd writes "NPR had a recent report about scientists at the University of Ulm who suggest that ants in desert environments count to help them get to and from their homes. Because the desert's windiness and sandiness is not conducive the 'smell-trail' method, where ants squeeze certain glands that leave a chemical trail, scientists were puzzled by the fact that these desert ants were able to leave and successfully return to their nest. The theory is called the 'pedometer theory,' and the experiment used to test it involves manipulating the leg length of some of these ants. Ants with longer legs would pass the nest on the way home, and ones with shorter legs came up... well... short."
This doesn't prove ants can count (Score:5, Interesting)
If the experience results are valid, there is still a difference between counting and remembering and reproducing a sequence of movements.
Ants might remember that they have to do "step step step step step step step step" to get back to their nest without actually counting. This would seem much more natural to me.
Here is an example applicable to humans: As a drummer, I can create and reproduce the same roll on the fly. But if you asked me how many times I hit the drum pad, only then I would have to count. I did not need to count in order to reproduce the roll nor did I know how many times I actually hit the drum pads.
This leads me to believe ants cannot count, why would they need to. Counting is good for humans in order to trade, so they have developed that capability. Same goes for female animals that could notice one of their puppy is missing. They don't have to "count" them, they only have to remember a picture of all the puppies and notice the picture they now see is different from the normal picture. There is many more examples you can think off where one can appear to count without actually doing so.
Re:This doesn't prove ants can count (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This doesn't prove ants can count (Score:4, Insightful)
I admit I'm not a drummer, but I have played other instruments - surely if we're talking about an entire song rather than one bar, the person still has to count lines/bars (e.g., this bit happens 4 times, before going onto the next bit, and these two sections alternate two times)? This would be especially true if the drummer was playing on their own, without being able to rely on listening to the music.
Ants can count. The reason it sounds uncomfortable is because it might imply a comparison to how humans count - we do it using our sentient mind. I doubt that this is the case for ants. But even if it's done by some automatic mechanism, I don't think "counting" is unreasonable (I mean, we say that computers can count, even if it's just following an automatic process that a human set up).
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What I was trying to say is that counting usually involves numbers. You could build a car engine (or do almost anything) without using numbers. Instead of knowing the clearance for a given part is say 11mm, you could just use a mark on blank ruler or other tool the find out the right clearance. I suspect something similar is going on with the ants.
Also, I am glad you specified that you were no drummer. Drummers can reproduce songs with thousands of hits on the drum pads over and over again without counting.
avoid the "pom" word on Net (Score:5, Funny)
> He could as well go "Pom, pom, pom"
Everyone who saw "P o r n, P o r n, P o r n", please raise your hands?.... Thought so!
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Looks like you've got a naughty kerning algorithm...
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Only because they are guided by the music perhaps, but you gave me an interesting idea. Imagine the music as a metaphor for the scenery passing by as you journey from point A to point B. In fact, imagine you are a little ant listening to the beat of your six little feet as the landscape rolls by... Passing through this little valley took so long, climbing up that hill the rhythm changed, and running dow
Counting or timing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Which brings us to the question: Are the ants really counting steps or is it based on timing?
Because you could get a similar result if it's based on timing. For example the ant walks to point X and it takes 60 seconds, so on the return journey, somewhere in the ants brain there's a countdown from 60 seconds (or more likely a increase/decrease in "potential"). With longer, but not much heavier legs the ant could sti
Not timing, read the article (Score:2)
"Wolf and Whittlinger trained a bunch of ants to walk across a patch of desert to some food. When the ants began eating, the scientists trapped them and divided them into three groups. They left the first group alone. With the second group, they used superglue to attach pre-cut pig bristles to each of their six legs, essentially putting them on stilts. The third group had their legs cut off just below the "knees," making each of their six legs shorter.
After the meal and the makeover, the ants were released
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I beg to differ. If they find their way home by walking for a fixed length of time, the experiment would have come out exactly the same. That's because ants take a fixed number of steps per minute, whether their legs have been lengthened, shortened or left alone. Thus, there's no way that you can tell (from the experiment as described) if the ants are counting their steps (as the researchers claim) or walking for a fixed length of time.
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No. It's pure speculation on my part, but seems (to me, at least) reasonable. Most animals have a natural pace that they use whenever possible because it's the most energy efficient, and I'd expect it to be the same for ants. I find it hard to believe without proof that ants have the understanding to change their pace depending on the length of their legs, as that would take more reasoning power than they've been shown to have.
I'm not saying that ants are aware of t
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Of course not. It's pure speculation.
depends what you mean by 'count' (Score:2)
> What I was trying to say is that counting usually involves numbers.
i would take a broad view of the word "counting" and define it as something like "the ability to remember and compare quantities", regardless of the presence or not of a theory of numbers.
with this view, the ants, the drummers, and the mamas w/ the puppies are all counting.
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1457756&cid=30238628 [slashdot.org]
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This would denote that the ants have memorised a
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> "It seems these ants do rely on walking the exact same number of steps each time. "
I don't think so, I figure the ants are smart enough to find the nest when they are only a few steps away from it. Also, see my above example on drummers playing whole songs without counting. Counting is typically human and gets in a way when you play music, you only count when you are beginning and learning to play. Who knows ? Counting might be a very primitive behavior after all. If more intelligent life forms exist,
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The way I see it even though you aren't consciously thinking of the number of drum beats as they pass by, you are still perceiving that number of beats and keeping track of it somewhere in your sub conscious. You may not use the same system to count, but I would argue that any method which is used to keep track of an incrementally increasing value even when not specifically defined as a number is a form of counting.
Music is probably the most common form of sub conscious counting we have, what is counting if
Re:This doesn't prove ants can count (Score:4, Funny)
These six-legged insects count in base 6, of course.
Re:This doesn't prove ants can count (Score:5, Interesting)
Been quite a while since I played drums, but I still remember having to learn how to reproduce certain sequences, and that involved counting the number of repetitions.
I can't remember what it's called but the one where you emphasise every third hit (i.e. HIT, hit, hit, HIT, hit, hit etc) came quite fast, and I can still do that one without even trying (including alternating between 2nd, 3rd and 4th). The one that has every fifth hit (HIT, hit, hit, hit, hit, HIT, hit, hit, hit, hit) is one I never got the hang of, and I remember spending a LOT of time trying to burn it into my muscle memory.
But the 3rd one, while easy, still required learning by counting "ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three" for quite a while.
My point is, when you get really really good at something, like drumming, you don't count at a concious level, but in order to get that good, you did need to count.
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If the ant has no way to tell where it's located at, how can it run the straight way "home"? Hence the ant knows exactly where "home" is
Some ants use a type of sense of smell to know where they've been (if they leave a chemical trail) and where the nest is. I expect the scent from the nest diffuses in the environment, so they just have to head "uphill" in the scent gradient to get to the nest. This, at least, is how I've seen ant simulations programmed.
I don't know how this applies to the experiments here
Re:This doesn't prove ants can count (Score:5, Informative)
No, you misread, he said that when you move an ant, they act like they haven't been moved. They don't get home, they go where they think home is without taking into account the offset taken when they were moved, which means they're blindly walking back with no regard for environmental clues.
Re:This doesn't prove ants can count (Score:4, Insightful)
Math isn't just about a bunch of numbers. Push down automata can count (I know, it's incredible! Even more so considering they have no fingers) The program as I heard it basically described a behaviour which could easily be simulated via a push down automata.
As a drummer, you might be so accustomed to a particular rhythm that you don't count it out in the literal sense of counting out loud, but you do put eight strikes into a measure. Whether you acknowledge that as counting or not, it is still counting, it is just counting that you have become so accustomed to that you don't consider it counting because you need to reframe it in a different context before you can acknowledge to yourself that you are counting.
Rather than using your own logic to falsify the scientist's hypothesis, perhaps you should have listened to the details of the experiment and observed the results. You might have found a superior but alternate explanation, in which case you would have expanded the realm of possibilities a bit. You might even be able to suggest a follow up experiment to differentiate between the counting hypothesis and your alternative to determine which is more correct.
I take it that you haven't done much with functional programming languages, as there are often certain types of problems that are more easily solved in functional languages by counting in the manner of "one one one one one" (as five) than by actually storing a five.
And while I'm at it, trade doesn't require counting. Bartering might involve counting, or it might simply be a swap of my fishtank for your LP collection. However, the idea that we knew counting would be good for trade so we developed counting is a cunning bit of mental gymnastics; it's the mental equivalent of putting the cart before the horse.
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As a drummer, you might be so accustomed to a particular rhythm that you don't count it out in the literal sense of counting out loud, but you do put eight strikes into a measure. Whether you acknowledge that as counting or not, it is still counting, it is just counting that you have become so accustomed to that you don't consider it counting because you need to reframe it in a different context before you can acknowledge to yourself that you are counting.
I'm skeptical. There could be something else other than enumeration at some level going on. He could be perceiving it more like a frequency on some level.
For instance, I was an exchange student in Finland. I learned to roll my 'r's when speaking Finnish. Years later, I read in a book about learning Finnish that Finns "give three or four flicks of the tongue for a rolled r". Thinking, I said several finished words to myself and realized that I was consistently doing 3 flicks. Nobody had ever told me 'three
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that's a rather human-centric definition of count (Score:2)
If you think more abstractly... There's no reason that "counting" has to denote that you mentally encode a number in decimal notation. If you can remember some nontrivial quantity, regardless of what process you use to recall it, I see no reason why you can't call that "counting".
For example, we can say informally that a pushdown automaton has the ability to count, because it can retain some unbounded memory of the number of symbols it has encountered. The information is there, even if you can't directly
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Uuum... What you describe IS counting.
It’s astonishing to what lengths people go, to preserve their arrogant world view of “superiority”.
A hundred years ago, common “knowledge” was, that animals don’t “think” and have no “souls” or “emotions”. They thought they simply simulate it and are in fact basic automatons.
Well, nowadays we know, that we are basic automatons too. That thinking and emotions are merely mechanisms. And that there is
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Re:This doesn't prove ants can count (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still not counting, though it can reproduce the effects. A calculator doesn't actually count (it's just bit switching), but it reproduces the effect. Granted it means that whatever it's doing can simulate the effect of basic counting, but it in no way represents the understanding of numbers
Well, this is science. These researchers had a hypothesis that ants can count and devised an experiment to test the hypothesis. Based on their assumptions, the evidence from the experiments support their hypothesis.
Your hypothesis is that it's not counting but something else. It seems the next step is for you to devise a way to isolate counting from doing a counting-like behavior in ants and do an experiment to test your hypothesis.
However in a way, you're just playing with the definition. What does "understanding of numbers" mean? And is it really integral to counting? If you use pacecounter beads (Ranger beads: http://www.instructables.com/id/Army-Ranger-Beads/ [instructables.com]), you are "counting" on a piece of string but not actually keeping numbers in your head. In fact, the whole point of those is that you don't have to keep track of numbers because it's hard to do when you're exhausted and have all the other soldier-things to keep track of. You could use these beads to go out some distance, turn around and come back the same distance. You wouldn't have to use numbers in your head, but counting is still being done.
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However in a way, you're just playing with the definition.
It is this kind of "playing with the definition" that really helps science a lot. Suppose we can find another way that ants could do this, without counting. That might give us insight into how their brains and bodies work. That might help us to design smarter chips, or algorithms, or something like that. And when biology and psychology are involved, as is the case here, subtle things like that are actually very useful.
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What next, you'll be saying that a child who catches a ball thrown by the parent isn't doing quadratics in his head, or that a child recognizing a pitch of sound isn't doing a fourier analysis in his head. Pshaw!
But really, as you say, there are many ways to implement "don't walk past the home nest" than counting the number of ant steps. Assuming a consistent pace, walking for some amount of time would do, or walking until you get run down a certain amount, etc. Once near the nest, there are presumably ot
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...and if while you weren't looking somebody switched your drum sticks for another set, longer or shorter than you were using, would you play slower or faster accordingly?
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I just knew it. The drummer isn't counting. They always say that they're counting but here's the proof!
How can you tell a drummer's at the door?
The knocking speeds up.
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And there are a lot of Ant drummers.
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As a drummer, I can create and reproduce the same roll on the fly. But if you asked me how many times I hit the drum pad, only then I would have to count. I did not need to count in order to reproduce the roll nor did I know how many times I actually hit the drum pads.
If that roll were more than a few seconds long, you would likely have to count. You wouldn't necessarily count the actual individual drum hits, but you would likely count the beats, or the bars, or the seconds, or something.
This leads me to believe ants cannot count, why would they need to.
Well, maybe to be able to travel great distances and then return to where they came from? Much like the theory suggests they are doing.
Counting is good for humans in order to trade, so they have developed that capability.
You misunderstand evolution. Humans have the capability to count, so they have developed trade utilizing that capability. Similarly, ants (theoretically)
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Sure, I understood that ;-)
This is why I posted about it, this reminds me adds where they misuse words in order to make the product look better than it is in realty and this is what I am against.
I have trained my dog so when I show him a picture of the number "1" he barks once. When I show him a picture of a "2", he barks twice. When I show him a picture of 1+1, he barks twice.
Now, I am going to post my findings on /. pretending that not only can dogs count, but they can also read and perform addition.
Do yo
I felt a pang... (Score:5, Insightful)
So did I :( (Score:2, Funny)
Especially when you think how similar to us ants really are. I mean, when I read:
ants squeeze certain glands that leave a chemical trail
I went "I can do that too!"
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Few ants escape the great finger of God, they should be grateful to get off with only a few scratches!
Re:I felt a pang... (Score:4, Funny)
I'll, too, admit that the thought of having my limbs chopped makes me a bit antsy...
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Many species of ants have elaborate social structures. Ants communicate with one another through touching, chirping, hearing, feeling, and chemical perception. Some species of ants live solely by enslaving other ant species to do their food gathering for them. Ants farm lesser species such as aphids for their excretions.
Don't feel too bad.They'd enslave us and use us for our excretions too if they could. If ants weren't so tiny, we would be at war with them, and they'd be pretty badass foes.
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I for one welcome our new ant overlords!
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From TFA (emphasis mine),
Scientists put stilts on desert ants and discovered that in time, the ants could calculate the correct number of steps it took to get home.
:). TYVM.
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Lovely Homepage you have there. In spite of what you might believe in this now moment... you are destined for an exciting and interesting life. Thanks you for sharing with us.
Sanat
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Yeah, except they don't have hands and feet, but exoskeletons. They work a bit differently from us. I'm not sure how you can relate to having your exoskeletal legs shortened.
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I know what you mean.
My first thought reading through the post, was "Oh, maybe they put a sort of treadmill en-route to make the number of steps less than the required amount to reach home" and then I got to the "pull the legs off bit".
I guess I don't have the amorality in me, to make it as a real scientist.
What happened to giants of the community like Feynmann, and the way he treated his ants [mathpages.com]?
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Almost as bad as the way Schrödinger treated his cat [wikipedia.org].
Re:I felt a pang... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ditto.. something about humans and the way they treat life with utter contempt...
I could make the same argument about humans. "...something about humans and the way they treat all life as sacred..."
There are very few creatures on the planet that actually react with sadness when something is killed (other than their very close kin)
Hex, is that you? (Score:2)
++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.
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Everyone knows ants count in base-8 (six legs + two antennas).
that accounts for distance... (Score:4, Insightful)
but not direction. Like doing "dead reckoning" with pace but no azimuth.
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No, no, no! Adding it yourself to Wikipedia does not count!
-dZ.
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Have you ever tried to navigate in the desert using "general direction"?
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I read TFA...but have you ever tried to navigate in the desert using "general direction"?
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I guess it depends on what they mean by "general direction".
I take it to mean something less than degrees or angular mils...as in cardinal and ordinal direction.
The magnetic field, if it can be read accurately (like a compass), giving the ant fine-grained azimuths..that would work great.
If you go 100 meters and are off by 1 degree, you deviate by about 17 meters. circle/360
If you are off by 1 angular mil, you are off by 1 meter. circle/6400
But circle/8 as in cardinal and ordinal direction...each ordinal has
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Err....I meant 1000 meters:
If you go 1000 meters and are off by 1 degree, you deviate by about 17 meters. circle/360
If you are off by 1 angular mil, you are off by 1 meter. circle/6400
Just had to do it. (Score:4, Funny)
Experimental set-up raises a few questions (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm not being too serious here, but, even though these are just ants, wouldn't it be wrong to assume that I didn't arrive home with my legs cut off beneath the knee because of the resulting leg length?
I mean even though ants a just insects they are really complex mechanisms and there might be some form of damage reaction other than shorter steps after a partial limb loss - like general weakness and reduced desire to go anywhere at all?
Still, desert-roaming ants on stilts (I'm guessing that's how they've inc
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They said the ants with the short legs took the same number of steps. It would be unlikely that they would get tired or give up at that specific point.
Re:Experimental set-up raises a few questions (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, that might be a good explanation for the reason the short legged ants failed to arrive home. However, it doesn't explain why the artificially leg lengthened ants overshot their nest. I mean, if it were you or me, we would have seen our home and stopped, so the ants must really heavily rely on step counting.
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So it makes perfect sence that if the Ant got to where he thought the nest was ...
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But the ants were moved so that they would never actually reach there home.
Where did you get that idea from? Certainly not the article. Quoting TFA:
The regular ants walked right to the nest and went inside.
The ants on stilts walked right past the nest, stopped and looked around for their home.
The ants on stumps fell short of the nest, stopped and seemed to be searching for their home.
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Actually - you raise an interesting point, though I think the other stilt-test discounts it, but I remember reading that insects have neuron clusters on each limb, which respond to stimulus and control them. This is part of how they are able to navigate such complex terrain - dedicated mini-brains on each leg controlling just that leg.
One has to wonder if they made sure not to damage those nerve-clusters.
I heard one of the ants in the experiment speaking (Score:1)
"Help! Help! I c'ant find my home!" she said.
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"Help! Help! My leg length has been modified!" she said.
Re:I heard one of the ants in the experiment speak (Score:4, Funny)
That's got to be awful confounding... I bet the poor thing is stumped!
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i felt TFA had a rather stilted tone..
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That's what she said!
Har! Har!
Oh...
-dZ.
How many steps before register overflow? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can think of a number of follow-on experiments to tell us more about this mechanic.
First I think you'd want to establish more conclusively that it is counting or memory of steps or actions, and not something in the environment:
- Replace the sand behind them on their path and see whether they can still get back.
- Put them on a treadmill to get to their location and back so that their aren't actually moving relative to the earth and see whether they still get back.
- Once this get to the food, rotate the artificial section of ground it is on 180 degrees and see whether they still get back.
- Change the wind direction in an artificial environment and see whether they can still get back.
- Reverse the location of the primary light source in an artificial environment and see whether they can still get back.
Then explore the limits of the counting or action memory mechanism:
- Keep extending the number of steps to get to food until they can't remember how many steps to get back.
- Keep extending the number of steps in a path with a turn in it, on each side of the turn, and compare to the path with no turn.
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I listened to the story yesterday on the radio, and as far as I recall, they implied that the scientists performing the experiment acknowledged that the ants actually took the same number of steps when returning home. This is why they claim that the ants either over- or under-shot their home nest when returning, not just that they stopped somewhere else.
If they actually counted the steps the ants took each way and confirmed them to be the same, then this is significant, and gives more credence to the "pedo
This is oooold news (Score:4, Informative)
Science 30 June 2006:
The Ant Odometer: Stepping on Stilts and Stumps
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5782/1965 [sciencemag.org]
And here's the original /. story from 2006
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/30/006245 [slashdot.org]
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I can't tell if these crippled ants are the ones from 2006 or the experiment was repeated and they are crippling new ants. At least this time some of the ant legs' lengths are being extended with stilts instead of being truncated. Seems more humane.
Re:This is oooold news (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you. /. article are worth a read.
The comments in the old
Esp.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189951&cid=15635693 [slashdot.org]
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189951&cid=15634139 [slashdot.org]
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189951&cid=15634257 [slashdot.org]
Makes an interesting read. Also, good to have a comparison between the average quality of comments from 06 and 09 in /.
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Sounds like frogs ... (Score:5, Funny)
To determine how what proportion each leg contributed to a frog's jumping distance, a scientist trained a frog to jump on command. He then measured the distance with all legs, and remeasured after successively removing one leg at a time.
His conclusion: that since the frog, with all legs removed, did not jump after hearing the command, that the frog was now deaf.
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I wonder... (Score:1, Funny)
How do these scientists at the University of Ulm get to and from their homes when the ants are not counting for them?
Does it mean..? (Score:3, Insightful)
But does it mean that they can sort tiny screws in space?
Homing in (Score:3, Interesting)
Quote: "Celestial cues, such as the sun or patterns of polarized sky light, appear to have no detectable effect in the precise homing orientation of foragers of Paltothyreus tarsatus. Field and laboratory experiments reveal that canopy patterns are a major influence in the home range orientation of this ponerine ant, a common species in African forests. Canopy orientation appears to be well suited to the restrictive lighting conditions of tropical forests."
c.f. [sciencemag.org] Canopy Orientation: A New Kind of Orientation in Ants; BERT HÖLLDOBLER, 1980
Quote: "Cataglyphis bicolor, an ant widely distributed in North Africa and the Near East, orient to the sun as well as to visual patterns of the environment. These two mechanisms can be separated. Foraging ants (hunters) orient to terrestrial cues as long as possible, and only after these have become ineffective do they switch over to the menotactical sun orientation. In the digging individuals, however, the visual knowledge of locality is significantly inferior to that of the hunters. Diggers vary considerably in size, but hunters belong to the largest size group. In addition, the largest and smallest individuals orient differently toward black and white areas and stripe patterns."
c.f. [sciencemag.org] Homing in the Ant Cataglyphis bicolor; Rudiger Wehner and Randolf Menzel, 1969
How to become an expert 'in ants' these days?
CC.
True masters of the Earth (Score:4, Funny)
Phase IV (Score:2)
For anyone wondering why this story is tagged phaseiv [imdb.com]...
I thought it was pretty cool, because AFAI knew I was the only person who remembered this film.
I can count. (Score:2)
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10/A, 11/B, 12/C, 13/D, 14/E, 15/F, ... :D
Old news is old (Score:2)
Might not be relevant to the topic at hand per se, but this is _old_ news. I saw this several years ago...
Let me guess (Score:2)
More Likely Explanation (Score:2)
Ants carry with them a cognitive map, that is an image of their environment (created from perceived and recalled information) and a self-image (their kinesthetic perception of their self embedded in the environment). They compare their environment with their self image constantly to locate/orient themselves and detect/evaluate potentially positive or negative environmental elements. In that comparison is direction and distance related information with which they can estimate walking time/steps. If either or
Automated Alice (Score:2)
The termites are running around frantically while she follows. It turns out she was caught in a mathematical calculation where the termites movements could be used to solve complex problems.
Quite fun really, I recommend Vurt if you want an introduction to Jeff Noon.
Ummmm...cruel! (Score:2)
>and the experiment used to test it involves manipulating the leg length of some of these ants
The would either use pieces of duck tape to hold the dismembered limbs together after having cut them to make different length legs..
or add wood chips to the bottom to increase the length beyond the leg length.
I would hate to be one of those ants on that day!
Not just old, wrong too (Score:2)
Not only is this result super old, but the conclusion has also been invalidated for quite some time. Changing the structure of the ants' legs can change their ability to integrate distance in many ways. The pedometer hypothesis is but one explanation.
That explanation does not hold up when considered with other results, such as testing ants leaving and coming back over different terrains. If ants are counting steps, then hilly vs. flat terrain will cause problems (since hilly terrains require more steps than
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Re:god, that name! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:god, that name! (Score:4, Informative)
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Except you didn't use this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86 [wikipedia.org]
Now who's lazy?
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They can count time?
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