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To a lot of people, ants just wander around randomly; they run into walls, each other, and the occasional food source. While it may appear this way, they actually use highly advanced forms of communication and 'bread crumb' trails to find their way. A Chinese German research group found that there were three main steps ants use to efficiently find food and bring it back to their colony.The first step is scouting. This is probably the most qualifying step of 'random' but is still far from it. A scout ant will venture out looking for food. Most scouts go in a circular rotation around the colony, leaving a pheromone trail as they went. We learned a little about pheromones during our animal behavior unit, so it is cool to see it in application again. This pheromone trail is what allows the ants to find their way home, other ants find the source of food, and ensure scouts aren't duplicating search routes. The second step is bringing the food back. As stated before, the ant, once nibbled off a bit of the food to show the rest of the colony, will follow it's pheromone trail home. The last step occurs when the ant returns home. The scout shows it's found food to other ants and they decide as a group if they want to go get the rest of it. It they go, this is where the classic ant line marching takes place. Everyone follows the same pheromone trail there and back and the colony now has food!
I always like articles where we can see what we learned in class be applied to real scientifically studies, and this is a great example of just that! We did touch a bit about ants in class, but I think this article was a great one to really learn more about the topic and dive in depth to it.
NOS Themes:
Science is Collaborative: Two teams from two different countries each conducted their own, but similar studies and compared results.
Science is Based on Evidence: The research teams were actually able to detect the left behind pheromone trail to ensure correct results.
Role of Motivation and Curiosity: It's a life long question many people have; Why do ants move in a line? This study can prove that.
~Ben Johnson
Ants, like many other organisms, do a lot more than people give them credit for. Another example would be bees, bees go through a lot to make honey and finds new homes to live in. Most people only think that bees just fly around and sting people.
ReplyDeleteI found this very interesting and relevant to the animal behavior unit. As Mukund pointed out, bees also do the same. When you think about it, humans do the same too. A good example would be the gold rush. Someone mapped their way to the gold source and brought gold back. Pretty soon everyone was going to the source of gold. This psychological effect is called the hive mind. An experiment on how bees use the hive mind can be found here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-have-a-hive-mind/
ReplyDeleteIn that article researchers found how bees were able to communicate with each other on moving to new homes and how they collectively make a decision.