( Have you ever tried to do the limbo? Fo...)How low can you go? Ants learn to limbo

Have you ever tried to do the limbo? For ants it's a way of life! Scientists at the University of Zurich have discovered that ants are able to learn how to visually judge the height of horizontal barriers so that they can successfully crawl under it without slowing down. Tobias Seidl will be presenting his latest research findings at the Annual Meeting for the Society for Experimental Biology on Tuesday 4th April.

Desert ants generally scurry around at high speeds whilst foraging to limit their exposure to the life threatening conditions of their habitat. Climbing over or crawling beneath obstacles means that ants do not have to make large detours to go around them.

"We found that the ants visually assessed the height of the barrier and learned how to lower their body enough to crawl under without stopping", explains Tobias Seidl, "When the barrier was made invisible to them, they had to use their antennae to examine it".

The researchers motivated the ants to run back and forth by placing biscuit crumbs flavoured with melon and tuna at one end of a channel. They observed the ants' reaction towards a horizontal barrier placed between the food and the ants' nest using high speed video recordings from the side. They then tracked the ants' movements and did a kinematic analysis of the results.

'"/>

Source:Society for Experimental Biology


Page: 1
Related biology news :

1. Structure-building cell signals also may influence learning and memory
2. Building a protein name dictionary from full text: a machine learning term extraction approach
3. Mice brains shrink during winter, impairing some learning and memory
4. More animals join the learning circle
5. Insight into the processes of positive and negative learners
6. Researcher says flu responders can learn from 1918 epidemic
7. Researchers learn how blood vessel cells cope with their pressure-packed job
8. Neurons generated in the adult brain learn to respond to novel stimuli
9. Scientists learn to predict protein-stabilizing ability of small molecules
10. Picking apart how neurons learn
11. How the brain learns to become addicted