FORAGING ants use a 鈥渢rip computer鈥� in their brains to learn the way back to
their nest.
Ants rely on landmarks to navigate, but also use a system of dead reckoning,
thought to involve counting steps. When Tom Collett of the University of Sussex
in Brighton and his colleagues allowed ants to run through mazes with symbols
above the choices of passageways, they found that the insects learnt these
landmarks more quickly when their dead reckoning told them that they were
heading in the right direction (Nature, vol 399, p 769).
鈥淲e know that at any point ants can subtract the coordinates of their current
position from their goal position and compute the direction home,鈥� says
Collett.
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