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.
A single ant wount not survive on its own. They are more like moving organs or tissue than individual organisms.
The ant will join up with a group of circus preforming bugs and they will all make their way back and form a plan for how to take down their oppressive grasshopper overlords with a fake bird
20m? It will most likely find it’s way back.. Further than that, it’ll just keep wandering around looking for food until it dies of some cause or the other.. It needs to find the scent trail of it’s colony, if it doesn’t find the scent, it has no way of getting back
What if you take q queen and drop it off 20m from the hill?
It depends on how far the colony travels for food. Ants leave chemical trails around to help them find their way back to the colony. It comes out of their abdomen, the round part that would be analogous to the human butt.
They navigate by smelling the pheromones left by other ants. If the colony has searched that 20 meter spot recently the ant will be able to find its way home. Otherwise, it has no natural sense that leads it back to the colony.
If you’ve ever have ants in your home or elsewhere you can test this yourself by taking some alcohol and wiping it over the trail they’re walking back and forth over. Coffee grinds work as well. But you’ll instantly see a change in the ants’ behavior: they’ll walk up to the part you wiped and become instantly confused, usually turning back from where they came.
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