Ant one of the tiniest creature of the earth but, this tiny creature has some special ability which Earth’s smartest creature don’t have. Everybody knows that an ant can carry 50 times heavier object than their body mass but, now scientists has discovered that an ant can self-navigate while coming back at home. Ants have a very small brain but it has memory enough to use celestial and terrestrial cues to memorize their paths.

An international research team from the university of Edinburgh and the lead researcher from Research Centre on Animal Cognition Dr. Antoine Wystrach started an experiment on ant’s behavior. They found that ants can get their bearings according to the orientation of their body. Their findings were first published in Current Biology on 19th Jan 2017.

Dr. Wystrach said in a statement,"Our main finding is that ants can decouple their direction of travel from their body orientation, They can maintain a direction of travel, let's say north, independently of their current body orientation".

Ants used to memorize their routes by projecting the sceneries to their multifaced retinas and they also use their body-centered, or egocentric, frame for reference. According to this hypothesis, ants need to orient their bodies to memorize the surroundings and to follow their previously traveled path. Sometimes they have to walk in reverse direction to return to their nest and it doesn’t prevent them to find the right way.

According to ScienceDaily, scientists studied on Cataglyphis Velox aka Andalusian desert ant which is well known for its navigational ability. Researchers first created a complex route which includes ‘U’ turn and ‘L’ (90°) turn and let those ants familiarize the path. Next day those ants had given a flex of cookie, light enough to carry without difficulty. Those ants maintained their bearing while carrying the cookie without turning back.

This behavior is really unexpected and mind-boggling. Scientists expected that they would drop the cookie crumb and look for their surroundings. This experiment denotes that they have 3 kinds of memories,
1.Normal visual memory for the route.
2.The memory of the new direction to memorize the turns.
3.The memory of the food to retrieve.

Scientists implied an another experiment by using a mirror but it doesn’t lead them to misdirection. Those ants used their celestial cues to maintain their bearings while walking backward. No matter how difficult their path is or how their body is oriented, once they memorize a bearing they always remain on the correct track. Both of the experiment suggest that ants register their route map with the allocentric frame of reference.

These experiments prove how intelligent ants really are and size doesn’t matter. This team will conduct more investigation on ants and several insects which will open up a new perspective about the special abilities of them.

Related