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'Hansel and Gretel' ants use geometry to find their way home

December 15, 2004

Scientists at the University of Sheffield have discovered that Pharaoh ants use angles to determine the direction of a trail, informing them whether they're travelling to or from the nest. The study, published in Nature on 16 December, explains how ants know which direction they are travelling in when following pheromone trails.

Duncan Jackson, from the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield, and lead author of the study, explains, "Some ants find their way by following pheromone trails, rather than by using sight. The ants should move away from the nest when they are foraging, and back towards it when they are laden with food but the pheromone trail leaves no way of knowing in which direction the ants are travelling.

"We found that it isn't the pheromones themselves that determine direction, but the angles that they are laid in. The trails are laid at 60 degree angles across the whole network. This means that the ants can tell which way they are going along any trail in the network."

Francis Ratnieks, also from the University of Sheffield and co-author of the study explained, "There have been many theories about how ants follow trails, including one by Richard Feynman, a well known physicist.

"He proposed that the ants left three different pheromones, one after the other, so that the ants could distinguish direction by the order of the pheromones in the trail. This solution is extremely complex with thousands of ants leaving pheromone the trails would become blurred eventually resembling a piece of paper with three words written on top of each other thousands of times.

"The actual mechanism is remarkably simple and demonstrates that sometimes the best solutions are the simplest."

Sheffield, University of

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