“Wasted”? They’re literally figuring out how the world around us works!
Yup, I got angry at that line, too. This person has obviously no idea about science…
From an article I found online:
A team led by Matthias Wittlinger, a biologist at the University of Ulm, Germany, made modifications to desert ants […]. After setting up an ant home outside the lab, the researchers let 25 ants take a 10-meter trip from their nest, then collected them. For one group, the team glued tiny stilts to the insects’ legs. For another, they clipped the legs down to stumps. And for a control group they left the legs alone. Then the researchers gave each ant a piece of food and set it free. With morsels of food in their jaws, the ants immediately headed home. If desert ants do indeed use an internal pedometer, then the modifications should mess up their calculations.
Not only did the stilted and stumpy ants not make it home, but they also misjudged their distances exactly as the researchers predicted. The ants on stilts went about 5 meters too far before stopping to search for the nest, whereas the stumpy ants stopped about 5 meters too short […] (Control ants got back home just fine.) After the modified ants were returned to the nest, they were able to go out and get back home just as accurately as normal ants, which should be the case if they’re keeping track of the number of steps.
But wait, the ants that were clipped, how did that work without painfully clipping their legs and how did they return them back to normal to go back home?
If these creatures can experience pain in the same conceptual way we do: they painfully clipped the ants legs and they didn’t return them to normal. Those ants were in hell.
Else: it was painless and the ants still had stump legs for the rest of their existence.
Which is why the meme is “Haha funny tall ants are dumb” instead of the slightly less fun “Ants without legs are confused af”
Well shit…
🤭
I’m not sure… ants walk really far. Think of how long it takes us to get human children to the point where they can count to 1000. Do ants just hatch with a sense of numbers?
Quorum sensing does not require a conceptual framework of numbers. The conceptual framework is the harder part, your brain and many cells perform quorumsensing and computations all the time that you would find difficult to do by hand, or to do symbolically.
I always assume they just left a trail of ant stank on the ground and everyone followed it to wherever the food was.
The second half of this experiment is far less wholesome:
To verify their findings, these scientists reran the experiment by cutting off ants’ legs at the knees. Those ants consistently undershot their targets, showing definitively that ants do actually count their steps.
So yay, verified results via torture!
Unfortunately most if not all of animal science involves torturing animals :'(
Anyone else wondering how they even thought “Do ants count their steps?” To begin with ?
Let alone “Do ants count ?”
I immediately know why and its not about steps its about communication. How do the ants know how many steps to the food? its because other ants communicated it. Im 99% sure that is what the study was about. So there is a lot they are verifying. communication. mathematical concepts, how they parse distance. remember the foot is called that because it was sorta an average size of a foot. yard is basically a stride.
Or if they can even walk on stilts. I know if some aliens came down and attached stilts to my legs I would just lay down and die.
I read ant bootie and thought of something ENTIRELY different
Title game on point tho
😎
Wasting budget and time? Grad students get paid?