ELI5, If you take a random ant from a colony and put it 20 meters away, will it find way “home”? Also, if you put an ant so far away from the colony, that it won’t be able to go back, will it survive on its own?
In: 128
No, unfortunately
Ants find their way home with 2 very precise set of information.
1- The smell. They follow the trail of chemical left by themselves of any individual from their colony
2- Step count. They count their steps very carefully. In experiments, we tried cutting their legs in half and they only made it half way back and stopped, confused. We also tried adding extensions to their legs and they walked way past their own colony without an afterthought.
Ergo, if we were to drop them far away with neither of those information to go by, they’d die before finding a way back anywhere.
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