If you ever want to do anything socially unacceptable, just say it’s for science.

I wonder what percentage of these weird studies that make us ask "why are they spending money on that?" are being done by students working on theses and doctorates and whatnot, and what percentage are non-scholastic institutions asking for government funds to see if you can teach penguins to French kiss.

To be clear this is probably someone's PhD thesis and they basically do it on their own dime with grants and such. It's not like the dod playing with bugs for some reason.

The best discoveries are the ones that start with somebody going, “Huh, that’s weird…”

Absolutely! The mentality that it's "wasted time and resources" is exactly how you extinguish progress, invention, and ultimately the ability to innovate existing tools.

This one's not even that far out there. Understanding how ants think has direct applications! Ants must take many thousands of steps in a day; being able to count them precisely requires certain cognitive facilities we wouldn't otherwise know existed. Next step: figure out how those things work with such simple cognition. Then apply that to self-organizing robots and use them to cure cancer or something.

But wait, the ants that were clipped, how did that work without painfully clipping their legs and how did they return them back to normal to go back home?

I don't see why not. Storing a count is not so complex and the animal kingdom is filled with impressive (to our perception) mental feats* (like the dedicated neurones for each octopus tentacles).

Ironically, I find the act of following a pheromone trail counting steps way simpler than them having detailed mappings of their surroundings.

Edit: fears -> feats

You don’t need a sense of numbers, in the abstract mathematical way humans use, to count.

Maybe a human child can’t count to 1000 but they could be taught to put a BB inside a jar every step they take. Then they can take a BB back out of the jar at every step on the way back. When the jar is empty, they’re near home. Even if they can’t count at all, they can keep track of thousands of steps this way given enough attention span and stamina.

Then, just imagine, instead of a BB’s in a jar it’s some chemical signal in the brain.

Maybe its less like a number as we know it, and more like an ant poem or other mnemonic representation?

If you woke up with stilts on one day wouldn’t you be confused? Seems self-evident that ants would be too. Like, “I don’t remember going to bed with stilts on, wtf man, what was I on last night?”

You ask it

Different species of ants have different methods.

Or if they can even walk on stilts. I know if some aliens came down and attached stilts to my legs I would just lay down and die.

I immediately know why and its not about steps its about communication. How do the ants know how many steps to the food? its because other ants communicated it. Im 99% sure that is what the study was about. So there is a lot they are verifying. communication. mathematical concepts, how they parse distance. remember the foot is called that because it was sorta an average size of a foot. yard is basically a stride.

Nah, the way ants can find their way around has been a favorite question of mine, and I know there's been a ton of people over lifetimes that have had curiosity about how exactly they navigate the world.

This answer, that they do count steps, makes more questions though. How do they count? Is it some kind of chemical reaction? Is it memory, are they counting in a way that we would recognize at all? Like, they could be fancy versions of those click counters bouncers use to keep track of how many people are up in the club, just some kind of chemical or mechanical tracker. It could be other methods that I can't think of because I know jack spit about ant biology at that level.

Reaching the specific question from "how do ants navigate" to "are they counting steps" isn't a big gap. I'm kinda surprised it took much time to get there tbh. Not sure when this experiment was done, but it's way easier than detecting pheromone trails or whatever else has been done.

I'd guess base 6 with their 6 legs.

Every base is base 10.

Ah, so you're an abdomen guy, eh? I'm partial to a nice thorax.