We all know that ants communicate with each other. But exactly how that works had not yet been researched until Nigel Franks decided to look for an answer.
What was the idea?
Prof. Nigel Franks of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences said, “Teaching is so important in our own lives that we spend a great deal of time either instructing others or being taught ourselves.” This should cause us to wonder whether teaching occurs among non-human animals. “And the first case in which teaching was demonstrated rigorously in any other animal was in an ant.” The team wanted to determine what was necessary and sufficient in such teaching. If they could build a robot that successfully replaced the teacher, this should show that they largely understood all the essential elements in this process.
How was the idea executed?
Prof. Franks’s team built a small robot that mimics the behavior of rock ants that use a one-to-one teaching method. This method is called “tandem running,” which is when one ant leads another ant to a valuable resource that he found so fascinating.
Prof. Franks explained the experiment he conducted to analyze his aim. He said that he waited for an ant to leave the old nest and put the robot pin, adorned with attractive pheromones, directly ahead of it. The pinhead was programmed to move towards the new nest either on a straight path or on a beautifully sinuous one. He also said that he had to allow for the robot to be interrupted in its journey, by us, so they could wait for the following ant to catch up after it had looked around to learn landmarks, and when the follower had been led by the robot to the new nest, the team allowed it to examine the new nest and then, in its own time, begin its homeward journey, and then used the gantry automatically to track the path of the returning ant.
The result of tandem running
After experimenting, Franks and his team observed a positive approach to his research: the robot had indeed taught the route successfully to the apprentice ant. The ants knew their way back to the old nest whether they had taken a winding path or a straight one. Before conducting the experiment, Frank added, “As a scientist, a cast-iron way of proving that you’ve understood something is to build something from scratch that works.” So, we thought we would try and replace the tandem leader with a robot.’
Why tandem running and how did it help the research?
The reason why tandem running takes so long is that the partner who is following stops periodically to look around. In a normal tandem run, the leader would stop to wait for the follower. To do this, the team used a joystick to control the movement of the pinhead. The two students involved, Jaboc Podesta and Edward Jarvis, – did a fabulous job with this research,” said Franks. But he further added that he also used the same gantry to follow the learner on his way back home. It was programmed to auto-track the movement of the ant returning home and to precisely record the coordination of its path all the way home.
After the successful research
After finding some actual proof that the research did reveal that the pinhead did not simply lead an ant to a valuable resource. The team was able to show that the following ant learned the route and was better at finding its way home than it would have otherwise been.
