Desert ants walk on treadmills to help scientists understand homing behavior. Scientists study how animals walk and run by putting them on treadmills-from elephants and crocodiles to animals as small as ants. Recently, researchers used a special treadmill to study the strange footwork of desert ants in order to better understand the mechanism they use to navigate home.

This is not a miniature version of the treadmill you found in the gym. Instead, ants are tied to a light ball. When these insects run forward, they sometimes stop and change direction. The ball will roll under them, and the sensor will record their every step.

Using this equipment, researchers can reproduce the homing behavior of ants on the treadmill for the first time, and make an unprecedented detailed analysis of ants' actions to evaluate their walking speed and gait changes when looking for nests. [Go! Since the 1960s, on the treadmill.

Tracking the gait of ants on a spherical treadmill has always been used in the study of small animals, but they are not sensitive enough to track the rapid movement of ants' calves. In order to carry out this new research, the researchers specially made a treadmill for ants. It contains a hollow polystyrene foam ball suspended in the air, which has a high response to the actions of ants. Scientists track the ball with an optical mouse sensor.

Researchers have designed a new type of spherical treadmill, which can respond to the tiny steps of ants. Mathias Wittlinger, a researcher at the Institute of Neurobiology in university of ulm, said, "Our new design enables us to study desert ants that run fast and turn very fast.

In an email, I told the science field that when ants walk, the running opportunities rotate accordingly. In order to keep the ant oriented but still move freely, a small tape made of dental floss is stuck on the ant's back and then attached to the pin hanging above the ball. Although this subtle connection sounds difficult to achieve, Wittlinger reported that it usually takes only a few seconds to stick ants to the tether.

These ants walking in the wild were caught at the feeder about 33 feet (10 meter) from the entrance of the nest, so they have determined a route that will lead them back to the nest. Once they are put on the treadmill, they will trot to the assumed nest position through the mechanism that previous studies show is crucial for ant navigation: using the position of the sun and the polarization mode in the sky as a compass, and calculating the distance by calculating their own stride, Wittlinger said, "KDSP" and "KDSP" treadmills allow scientists to record the direction and speed of ant walking; Flexible tethers enable animals to move in a more natural posture than previous studies-"The old design made animals strictly fixed, Wittlinger said:

"They actually ran a lot of meters on the treadmill, just like running in the wild," he explained.

Desert ants walk on treadmills to help scientists understand homing behavior. The authors of this study report that ants will start their treadmill journey in a direct way-directly to the nest. But when these insects didn't find the nest they wanted, they adopted a different movement mode, which Wittlinger called "search mode".

The findings of this study show for the first time that when ants realize that they are lost, they will switch to "search mode", slow down and then move in a circular mode, Wittlinger told Life Science in an email.

By replicating the condition of testing this complex behavior on ants-navigating home in an artificial environment, scientists can control and adjust various parameters to better understand this mechanism.