Intelligent ants know their way home

For such a small insect, the ant continues to impress by its strength, organisational skills, efficiency, and now, by its intelligence.

UK scientists are beginning to understand more about how memory functions in an ant’s behaviour.
 
University of Sussex researchers have observed that wood ants are able to retrieve the correct visual memory to enable them to either find their way back home, or reach a food source.
 
Neurobiologists Dr Rob Harris, Dr Natalie Hempel de Ibarra, Dr Paul Graham and Professor Tom Collett trained individual ants to follow a short foraging route parallel to a black wall.
 
As ants rely automatically on visual clues, they learned that the wall would be on their left when walking towards the food, and on their right walking home.
 
Later tests saw the trained ants dropped in midway along the wall, and while being unfed, they remembered that, to reach food, they had to walk with the wall to their left.
 
Alternatively, fed ants dropped in at the same point, walked with the wall to their right to get home.

Smart ants remember the landmarks around them

Professor Collett says: "Some ants are known to have surprisingly large memories; for instance, they will remember enough visual landmarks to follow visually guided routes over tens of metres between their nest and a feeding site.
 
"One problem with having many memories is that one must be able to retrieve the right memory in the right situation."
 
The scientist took into account that the world looks different when viewed in the two directions, which meant the ant had to keep its memories of how to reach the food separate from its homeward bound recollections.
 
"We were interested in seeing whether the ant's motivational state - hungry or sated - might trigger which visual route memories it retrieves," says Professor Collett.
 
"We found that in exactly the same visual environment, wood ants retrieved memories appropriate to their food-ward journey when hungry and to their homeward journey when full."

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