“Wasted”? They’re literally figuring out how the world around us works!
To be clear this is probably someone’s PhD thesis and they basically do it on their own dime with grants and such. It’s not like the dod playing with bugs for some reason.
I wonder what percentage of these weird studies that make us ask “why are they spending money on that?” are being done by students working on theses and doctorates and whatnot, and what percentage are non-scholastic institutions asking for government funds to see if you can teach penguins to French kiss.
Yup, I got angry at that line, too. This person has obviously no idea about science…
If you ever want to do anything socially unacceptable, just say it’s for science.
I’ve heard in psychology it’s the opposite, which is kind of unfortunate. Like one guy I follow on YouTube talked about wanting to research something (can’t remember what, but take something like pedophilia) but was told that if he went forward with it he’d be viewed as one because people often want to research what they’re familiar with. I personally find that a bit more important to study than whether ants track their steps, but I’m just one person 🥲
Remember, we do what we must because we can.
It’s for the good of all of us, except the ones who had their legs clipped off.
Look at you still talking while there’s science to do!
Research for the sake of research is how we make discoveries we never thought possible.
The best discoveries are the ones that start with somebody going, “Huh, that’s weird…”
Absolutely! The mentality that it’s “wasted time and resources” is exactly how you extinguish progress, invention, and ultimately the ability to innovate existing tools.
I remember listening to an NPR podcast and it was talking about wasting money in science. There was that “shrimp fight club” and millions being spent on it. Turns out the money was for a science lab and for students wages and just a bit of money went on the shrimp experiment. Didn’t stop the headlines though. When the scientist went to explain the point to the politicians. They said that the shrimp shells were so resilient and lightweight and studying it could yield military benefits. The politician said that they would only care about that specific use case. The scientist had to explain you don’t get one without the other.
I freaking love that! And I have a feeling conversations like that happen pretty often, and I have to know if they are documented now!
This one’s not even that far out there. Understanding how ants think has direct applications! Ants must take many thousands of steps in a day; being able to count them precisely requires certain cognitive facilities we wouldn’t otherwise know existed. Next step: figure out how those things work with such simple cognition. Then apply that to self-organizing robots and use them to cure cancer or something.
I mean, we could even try to extract how this works and use it to create a biological processor. Or a myriad of other stuff. This is actually a really interesting discovery
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 :'(
I always assume they just left a trail of ant stank on the ground and everyone followed it to wherever the food was.
Different species of ants have different methods.
2024: “Pfft, look at these scientists wasting time and money figuring out if ants count their steps. Ridiculous!”
2124: “…and that’s how the Ant-Step Computational Model allowed us to build the Warp Drive!”
On one hand… way to be assholes “scientists”.
On the other hand… I didn’t know technology existed that could possibly fix a broken spider leg and I need it.
Scientists should teach AI to be more like ants, maybe then it can finally do better math.
I read ant bootie and thought of something ENTIRELY different
deleted by creator
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.
Same, but not before I bust my shit on the pavement and scrape my knees bloody. Fun times–for the aliens.
I hope someone glues stilts to their legs then. What. It’s for science. Because we can’t figure out a better way to study how scientists get stilts glued to their legs.
Science is basically journalism about the natural world. If ants have exposed themselves to a laughable scandal, it’s only a matter of time before we’ve nailed their asses to a wall
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.
You don’t need a sense of numbers, in the abstract mathematical way humans use, to count.
Maybe a human child can’t count to 1000 but they could be taught to put a BB inside a jar every step they take. Then they can take a BB back out of the jar at every step on the way back. When the jar is empty, they’re near home. Even if they can’t count at all, they can keep track of thousands of steps this way given enough attention span and stamina.
Then, just imagine, instead of a BB’s in a jar it’s some chemical signal in the brain.
I don’t see why not. Storing a count is not so complex and the animal kingdom is filled with impressive (to our perception) mental feats* (like the dedicated neurones for each octopus tentacles).
Ironically, I find the act of following a pheromone trail counting steps way simpler than them having detailed mappings of their surroundings.
Edit: fears -> feats
I’m wondering if the “counting” could be derived from a form of proprioception rather than maintaining an active count. Distance just gets scaled and thrown off by longer legs.
The next question is going to be what the maximum number of steps an ant can store is and what happens when it overflows…
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.
Thank you! Link please ❤
Here’s the article: https://www.science.org/content/article/ants-stilts
And here’s what I think is the official scientific paper (says free with login): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16809544/
Thank you!
I wonder if they happen to use base 10?
Every base is base 10.
Woah
How do you determine an ant is confused ?
If you woke up with stilts on one day wouldn’t you be confused? Seems self-evident that ants would be too. Like, “I don’t remember going to bed with stilts on, wtf man, what was I on last night?”
They didn’t made it back to their nest.
