Yes, that is an ant wearing stilts. And no, it's not the result of some pimply adolescent's sadistic phase. The enhanced insect is part of an experiment to find out how desert ants can wander aimlessly for hours looking for food, then take a direct route back to their nest. (Try that without GPS!) Turns out, ants have something otherwise unheard of in the animal kingdom – a built-in pedometer. In North Africa's Tunisian desert, an international team of scientists let ants walk from a nest to a feeding site, then grabbed them, glued stilts to the legs of some, cut others' legs down to stumps, and set them all free. The stilties overshot the nest and the stumpies fell short, suggesting the ants knew how many steps would get them home. And when the researchers started the critters at the nest with their newly altered inseams, all made it out and back with no problems.
Of course, "animals can't count, except chimpanzees and maybe other primates," says neurobiologist and zoologist Harald Wolf, senior author of the study, published in Science. "Ants integrate stride length and stride number." In other words, they instinctually monitor their own gait. Combine this with their known ability to tell direction by light patterns and it seems ants use complex trigonometry to calculate that beeline for home. Pretty slick, but let's see them automatically locate the nearest Thai restaurant.
– Aria Pearson
credit:Matthias Wittlinger
An ant on stilts.
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