At least at one point of time, we have all admired and have been fascinated about the movements of ants. Their orderly march has always instilled wonder among environment enthusiasts and entomologists.
A recent study has shown that, ants guide themselves back to their homes using their memory and positions of the sun. While it is a well-known fact that ants’ navigational skills are very sophisticated, the recent study reveals that the degree of talent has been underestimated by human all these years. In fact, technologists comment that learning about ants’ navigation skills can help develop many computer algorithms to guide robots.
The experiments highlight that ants can always travel across the right path by following the sun’s position and their memory of the surroundings. “They can maintain a direction of travel, let’s say north, independently of their current body orientation.”, says Dr Antoine Wystrach of the University of Edinburgh and CNRS in Paris.
The reason for such navigational efficiency among ants is because they often live in large colonies and require large pieces of food to be transported to their homes.
Prof Barbara Webb of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics said that the movement of ants is much similar to the motion of a self-driving car. She also remarked that there is a such an advanced movement mechanism within them despite their brains being the size of a pin-head. She also quoted that they are currently trying to model the brain of an ant which would help in designing robots. These robots in turn can be used to wander through forests backing many ongoing technological researches.
