Ants grapple well with zero-gravity
Ants carried to the International Space Station were still able to use teamwork to search new areas, despite falling off the walls of their containers for up to eight seconds at a time. Their "collective search" was hampered but still took place, biologists said.
The insects also showed an impressive knack for regaining their footing after taking a zero-gravity tumble.
Researchers want to learn from the ants' cooperative methods and develop search algorithms for groups of robots.
The ants were sent aloft in a supply rocket in January 2014, and results from the experiments are published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
Speaking to the BBC's Science in Action, senior author Deborah Gordon said that ants have demonstrated their remarkable collective abilities in myriad environments on Earth, but the results from the microgravity conditions of the ISS were something new.
"We had no idea what the ants would do. We didn't know if they would be able to search at all," said Prof Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University.
As it turned out, although they had a little difficulty maintaining contact as they crawled, once adrift the ants showed a "remarkable ability" to get their six feet back on solid ground.
The team sent up eight colonies of 80 common pavement ants, housed in small, transparent plastic boxes. Each container had a "nest" area where the animals lived.
"The idea is to ask the ants to search a small space -- and then provide more space and see what will happen when the same number of ants have to use a larger space," Prof Gordon explained.
The ants in space still did their best to search, moving out into the expanded area as expected.
"All ants have to perform collective search and we don't know how they do it. There may be very interesting algorithms for collective search that we haven't discovered," Prof Gordon said.
Algorithms like these could help program robots to search in groups, without the need for a central control centre. And Prof Graham is asking for help to find out more about them.
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