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scientists wasting budget and time to see if ants count their steps

the idea to put ants on stilts

there had to be a guy who made ant stilts and put them on the ants

Can mantids wear and see in 3D glasses? YES

THEY PUT LITTLE GLASSES ON MANTIDS

Do honey bees suffer from sleep deprivation? YES

Here is the BEE INSOMNIATOR.

They put MAGNETS ON BEES  and WIGGLED THEM TO KEEP THEM AWAKE

How do scales help snakes move?

Well they put SNAKES IN LITTLE SHIRTS to find out!

SHRIMPS ON A TREADMILL

>somebody clearly was like “Oh well ants probably count their steps” and that was just like… a thought that came into their head.

Not just any ants–desert ants!  See, most ants lay down scent trails to find their way around.  But in the desert the damn ground blows away constantly.  So how do desert ants find their way around?  Maybe they count.

>scientists wasting budget and time to see if ants count their steps

Okay but like.  Ants can count.  Ants have teeny teeny tiny brains and they can count.  Do you know how teeny an ant brain is?  Because I have spent time dissecting them out and let me tell you it is one of the most ridiculous occupations I have ever engaged in.  They are like period sized.  <–these things here at either end–>. 

And the really cool thing about finding out that a teeny tiny brain can do a thing, is that the brains are simple enough that we actually might have a shot at figuring out precisely how they efficiently encode the ability to count.  And then we can apply that to things like math and computers and living human brains, which we aren’t allowed to dissect very much because reasons.

Also, this was an awesomely clever experiment because do you want to know the budget for gluing stilts on ants to see what happens?  Really small.  Like ant brains.

>there had to be a guy who made ant stilts and put them on the ants

Their names were Matthias Wittlinger, Rudiger Wehner, and Harald Wolf, and the stilts were boar hairs!  Also there was a second part of the experiment where they trimmed the ant legs to make them take shorter steps, but no one ever talks about that part because it’s less cute and more morbid. :O  (It’s… slightly less morbid when you know this kind of thing happens naturally to ants with age and high temperatures.  Life is hard for ants.  But they are excellent at counting.)

>Science.

my brain: