A team of Bristol researchers observed the exploratory behaviour of ants to inform the development of a more efficient mathematical sampling technique.
Animals like ants have the challenge of exploring their environment to look for food and potential places to live. With a large group of individuals, like an ant colony, a large amount of time would be wasted if the ants repeatedly explored the same empty areas.
In a paper published by the Royal Society, the interdisciplinary team from the University of Bristol’s Faculties of Engineering and Life Sciences, describe how they predicted the study species - the ‘rock ant’ - uses some form of chemical communication to avoid exploring the same space multiple times. Lead author, Dr Edmund Hunt, said:
“This would be a reversal of the Hansel and Gretel story – instead of following each other’s trails, they would avoid them in order to explore collectively. To test this theory, we conducted an experiment where we let ants explore an empty arena one by one. In the first condition, we cleaned the arena between each ant so they could not leave behind any trace of their path. In the second condition, we did not clean between ants. The ants in the second condition (no cleaning) made a better exploration of the arena - they covered more space.”
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Image via University of Bristol
