Saturday, January 21, 2017

Y'all Are Political Heretics ... and I Love It Like I Love Ants

No-one can tell any of you to do anything and that's the ideal.  We will listen and then make whatever move we see as rational and there's not a one of you who will do that for any sense of conformity with anything.  Unknown how you avoided the Floyd Sausage Machine but you did it.

Hat tip!


Y'all know where you're going because you have the sensitivity of ants.

Ed:  whoa, that was kind of insulting!

Really?  Read on.

An international team including researchers at the university of Edinburgh and Antoine Wystrach of the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (CNRS/Université Toulouse III -- Paul Sabatier) has shown that ants can get their bearings whatever the orientation of their body.  Their brains may be smaller than the head of a pin, but ants are excellent navigators that use celestial and terrestrial cues to memorize their paths.  To do so, they use several regions of the brain simultaneously, proving once again that the brain of insects is more complex than thought.  The researchers' findings were published in Current Biology on January 19, 2017.

- Science Daily:  Ants find their way even when going backwards

You see all around there are those who are going backwards without any idea where they will wind up.




Cataglyphis velox ant.

Credit: © Michael Mangan and Hugh Pastoll

- SD

Ed:  that was in case no-one ever saw an ant?

No tellin' but it was in the article.


In fact, that species of ant was the one selected for the study and they really are remarkable.

After walking backward a bit, they would occasionally drop their crumb, turn around, observe the scenery while pointing their bodies in the right direction, return to the crumb, and resume towing it backward -- but this time in the correct direction.  For these ants, body alignment thus seems necessary for recognition of scenery perceived by their retinas, but they are then able to memorize the new bearing and follow it backward.  This behavior also shows that they can recall the existence of the dropped cookie crumb, and its location, in order to return to it after updating their bearing.   These observations imply that at least 3 kinds of memory are working in unison: the visual memory of the route, the memory of the new direction to follow, and the memory of the crumb to retrieve.

- SD

It's considered an insult to call someone a 'pinhead' but these ants are and they navigate better than we.

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