As far as insects go, ants are pretty versatile. They know how to self-medicate when they're ill; don’t show any signs of ageing and use ant vomit to pass on hormones which influence the growth of ant babies.
But that’s not all they can do. A paper published in Current Biology demonstrates that ants can find their way home, even while travelling backwards or spinning around.
"Our main finding is that ants can decouple their direction of travel from their body orientation," Antoine Wystrach, from the University of Edinburgh, said. "They can maintain a direction of travel, let's say north, independently of their current body orientation."
For instance, if an ant is travelling north, they can navigate to their northern destination when going forward (facing north), travelling backwards (facing south) or even travelling sideways (facing east or west). For humans, that often rely on Google Maps to ensure correct navigation, this is pretty astounding.
Previous reports have shown the insects’ navigational abilities aren’t impaired when they are carrying heavy food loads. This suggested they ants are able to recognise the world around them regardless of the direction they were facing, which was said to be unusual. “This was at odds with our understanding of how memories of the scenes are stored in the insect brain,” explained Wystrach.
Wystrach and his colleagues set out to test this using desert ants in their natural habitat. The scientists created an ant-related obstacle course by sinking barriers into the ground so the insects could only travel in a one-way route back to their nest. The creatures were then given a small cookie or a larger one to test their navigational skills whilst carrying food.
The ants carrying a large cookie had to travel backwards to manage the load. Sometimes the ants travelling backwards would not stop to look at their surrounds and they would miss the right turn to get to their nest. However, a few of the insects stopped hauling their load, took a “peek” in the forward direction, and then pick up their load again and find their way back to the nest, still travelling backwards. They would recognise the new direction and memorise it.
"Such a peeking behaviour is impressive in itself as it implies synergy between at least three different types of memory: the memory of the visual scene, the memory of the new direction to follow, and the memory of the location of the cookie left behind," said Wystrach.
The insects were able to remember the scene based on looking forward, then transfer that memory to a representation of directions centred on the world around them, rather than themselves. Whereas before, researchers thought ant navigation was based on “stereotyped strategies from distinct brain modules,” this new evidence showed that it is actually about “fine orchestration of multiple representation and memories involving the transfer of information between different brain areas.”
It demonstrates just how intelligent the insects actually are; in that they have flexible behaviours and memories.
The team will now investigate the interplay between different brain areas that make behaviours, such as travelling backwards whilst going in the right direction, possible.
"The more research advances, the more sophisticated we realise insects are," said Wystrach.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
