A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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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.
Scientists should teach AI to be more like ants, maybe then it can finally do better math.
They could just teach the ants to be an AI like in a certain Tchaikovsky novel.
I read ant bootie and thought of something ENTIRELY different
Ah, so you're an abdomen guy, eh? I'm partial to a nice thorax.
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!"
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!
But wait, the ants that were clipped, how did that work without painfully clipping their legs and how did they return them back to normal to go back home?
Stilts (for life)
🤭
If these creatures can experience pain in the same conceptual way we do: they painfully clipped the ants legs and they didn't return them to normal. Those ants were in hell.
Else: it was painless and the ants still had stump legs for the rest of their existence.
Which is why the meme is "Haha funny tall ants are dumb" instead of the slightly less fun "Ants without legs are confused af"
Well shit...
What is this? Stilts for ants?
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.
For a friend?