Ant language

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Ant language

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From time immemorial, people have been dreaming about understanding animal “languages”. The problem of cracking animals’ codes have become especially attractive since the great “linguistic” potential was discovered in several highly social and intelligent species by means of intermediary artificial languages. Being applied to apes, dolphins and grеy parrots, this method has revealed astonishing mental skills in the subjects. However, surprisingly little is known yet about natural communication systems of animals.
Studying Animal Language Without Translation: An Insight From Ants
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Re: Ant language

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Scouts are very important specialists in the ant family, it depends on them whether insects will find food. Like scouting people, such ants need a sharp mind and resourcefulness, they are required to perfectly navigate in space, to memorize the road, and besides this - to transmit information to their relatives who are engaged in collecting and delivering food. In order to assess the capabilities of the scouts, Scientists used a binary tree.
A binary tree is a labyrinth in which a bait is hidden — a cotton wool moistened with syrup. In the maze, the ant makes a choice of two options at each fork: right or left. This option is one bit of information. Thus, the maximum amount of information that a scout must transmit from such a maze is six bits, because not every person will remember seven turns.
Scientists were surprised by the amount of time it takes to transfer a complex path. For six turns scout spent 200 seconds. Deciphering the tongue of ants turned out to be difficult, because they make too many different movements for a long time. Later, scientists found that the description of the way from several turns in one direction takes three times less time.
Ants-scouts do not tell anything, and foragers are following an odorous trail. In fact, within the framework of the experiment, two identical mazes are used, replacing the old one, which was visited by a scout, with a new one, which only foragers will use. So this exclude to follow an odorous trail for foragers.
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Re: Ant language

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Another version of the maze, which was used by scientists, is a comb of 15 end points. The further the bait is from the entrance, the more time the scout needs to describe the path to the foragers. But if you place a bait on any branch more often, then the ants begin to use this branch as a new point of reference.
If branch number 10 is often used, then a little more than 10 times are spent to describe the path to 11 branches — that is, ants describe the path as “10 + 1”. And exactly the same result in time shows a twig 9 - that is, "10-1". This is reminiscent of the Roman system of calculus - X, XI, IX. So scientists have proven that ants are able to add and subtract.
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