Scientists at the University of Bristol have developed a small robot to understand how ants teach one another.
The robot mimics the behaviour of rock ants that use one-to-one tuition, in which an ant that has discovered a better nest can teach the route there to another individual.
The findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, reportedly confirm that most of the important elements of teaching in these ants are now understood because the teaching ant can be replaced by a machine.
Key to this process of teaching is tandem running where one ant leads another ant along a route to the new nest.
The pupil ant learns the route sufficiently well that it can find its own way back home and then lead a tandem-run with another ant to the new nest, and so on.
Researchers, led by Prof Nigel Franks of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, built a large arena with an appreciable distance between the ants’ old nest, which was deliberately made to be of low quality, and a new, better one that ants could be led to by a robot.
A gantry was placed atop the arena to move back and forth with a small sliding robot attached to it, so that the scientists could direct the robot to move along either straight or wavy routes.
Attractive scent glands, from a worker ant, were attached to the robot to give it the pheromones of an ant teacher.
According to Franks, the team found that the robot had taught the route successfully to the apprentice ant – the ants knew their way back to the old nest whether they had taken a winding path or a straight one.
Franks added: “A straight path might be quicker but a winding path would provide more time in which the following ant could better learn landmarks so that it could find its way home as efficiently as if it had been on a straight path.
“Crucially, we could compare the performance of the ants that the robot had taught with ones that we carried to the site of the new nest and that had not had an opportunity to learn the route.
“The taught ants found their way home much more quickly and successfully.”
The approach could make it possible to interrogate further exactly what is involved in successful teaching.
