在突尼斯的沙漠盐湖中，他们为何要将“打工蚁”建起的“大山”夷为平地？｜科学60秒

2023-07-10 14:07

蚂蚁导航妙招

蚂蚁移山 @Pixabay

身处缺乏地标的突尼斯沙漠盐湖时，地面有时呈现出盐的刺眼白色，人们很容易迷失方向。德国耶拿马克斯·普朗克化学生态学研究所（Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology）的马库斯·克纳登（Markus Knaden）和同事马里利亚·弗莱雷（Marilia Freire）在这些沙漠盐湖里进行野外工作。

克纳登表示：“这是一种非常奇怪的感觉，身处其中有些人会感到不舒服，因为基本上你看不到任何东西。”弗莱雷说：“我们驾驶的汽车经常就是一种地标，这样我们就能知道如何返回。因为在这里真的很容易迷路。”

虽然对他们来说很容易迷路，但对他们的研究对象沙漠蚂蚁来说，情况并非如此。沙漠蚂蚁可以在这些平坦的平原上行走超过800米，并且仍能找到回家的路。

为了实现这一点，这些蚂蚁拥有一些技巧。克纳登说：“我们从它们身上得知，它们使用太阳罗盘（sun compass）来确定行进方向，并通过计算步数来确定走过的距离。通过这种方式，它们始终都能计算出自己相对巢穴的位置。”

但科学家们注意到，这些蚂蚁还有另一种技巧。它们的巢穴在平原上越远离植物、岩石和其他地标时，这些蚂蚁就越倾向于在巢穴入口处建造大型土堆。这些土堆看起来像是盐湖中的火山丘，有时高达25厘米以上。

对于这些微小的蚂蚁来说，这相当于一个人站在伦敦大本钟那么高的山前。

研究人员想要确定蚂蚁是否真的利用这些土堆进行导航。他们摧毁了一些巢穴入口处的土堆，然后……[查看全文]

These Ants Are Probably Better at Navigating Than You Are

Christopher Intagliata: It’s easy to get lost in the salt pans of Tunisia, these featureless plains in the desert where the ground is sometimes the blinding white color of salt.

Markus Knaden: It’s a very strange feeling, and some people feel uncomfortable there because you basically don’t really see anything.

Intagliata: Markus Knaden is at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. And he does fieldwork in the salt pans with his colleague Marilia Freire.

Marilia Freire: So actually the car we drove was often the landmark ... so we could know how to return back to it. Because it’s very easy to get lost.

Intagliata: While it’s easy to get lost for them, that’s not the case for their study subjects, desert ants that can walk for more than half a mile over these flat plains and still find their way home.

And to be fair, the ants have a few tricks that enable them to do that.

Knaden: We know from them they use a sun compass to get an idea what direction they walk, and they count their steps to get an idea of the distances they cover in an individual direction. And by that, they always compute their relative position to the nest.

Intagliata: But the scientists noticed the ants had another trick, too. The farther their burrows were into that flat, featureless plain, away from plants and rocks and other landmarks, the more the ants tended to build big mounds at the entrances of their nests. These are volcano-looking humps in the salt pan, sometimes more than 10 inches tall.

As a means of comparison, for these tiny ants, that’s the equivalent of a human standing in front of a mountain the size of London’s Big Ben.

And the researchers wanted to see if the ants really used these things for navigation. So they destroyed a number of the mounds and...[full transcript]

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论文信息

Freire, M., Bollig, A. and Knaden, M. (2023) ‘Absence of visual cues motivates desert ants to build their own landmarks’, Current Biology [Preprint].

DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.05.019

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