It's amazing how ants can navigate backward carrying the food back to the colony. These tiny arthropods use a terrestrial and celestial reminder to learn their paths by heart.
Ants are great navigator despite its brain which is smaller compared to a pin. These little insects find their way backward utilizing a number of brain regions all at the same time. This only shows that the brains of insects are more compound than thought. On January 19, 2017, the results of the research were published in Current Biology, according to Science Daily.
The researchers analyzed an ant species, Cataglyphis velox, an Andalusian desert ant which is recognized for its talent of navigating solely. The ants are allowed to acquaint themselves with a trail that included a 90° turn. After training for one day, ants that got a cookie crumb weightless enough to bring while walking forward managed the turn devoid of the least possible trouble.
"Our main finding is that ants can decouple their direction of travel from their body orientation," Antoine Wystrach, from the University of Edinburgh, said. "They can maintain a direction of travel, let's say north, independently of their current body orientation."
According to a Wired report, when an ant travels north, it can circumnavigate to its northern destination if going forward which faces north, moving about backward which faces south or even on the move sideways which faces east or west.
Preceding studies have disclosed that ants' navigational abilities are not defective when these small scavengers carry heavy food loads. This only shows that ants have the ability to familiarize the world with them apart from the direction they were facing, which could be said uncommon.
The new findings indicate that the ants' spatial orientation depends on varied multiple mental representations and memories tangled together through a current of information between numerous brain areas.
