Dr. Nigel Franks – Wild Showcase – Antzilla – Tracking Ants

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[Dr. Nigel Franks - Wild Showcase - Antzilla - Tracking Ants]

[Narrator] Source: LYBIO.net
Dr. Nigel Franks wants to know how ants make decisions. He’s enlisted some tiny lab partners that he calls rock ants. Each one of Nigel’s ants has a chip on her shoulder.

[Dr. Nigel Franks]
Well the chips are fantastic I mean they’re absolutely tiny so we can glue them on the back of an ant just two millimeters long. And what the chips enable us to do is to get each individual ant to identify itself to us.

[Narrator]
By identifying individuals, Nigel can tell who collects information, how they communicated and how a consensus is reached.

[Dr. Nigel Franks]
So here is the old nest which I’ve destroyed by taking off the top of microscope slide and they are pretty annoyed about that and pretty angry with me and so they got nowhere to live currently and they then have to find a new nest-site to live in. And we’ve offered them at the other end of the arena, a poor quality site over here and a really beautiful high quality nest site over there.

[Narrator]
The ants begin inspecting their two options. Every time an individual enters or exits the potential nest, a laser beam records its passing. This ant has discovered the good quality nest site. So she returns to the old nest and reports her findings. There is a brush of antennae; her body emits a pheromone, a chemical signal. Her sister ant receives the message, come and see.

[Dr. Nigel Franks]
They do a very special form of recruitment called tandem running. And that’s where one ant literally leads just a single other nest mate and what we’ve been able to show is a tandem running qualifies this teaching and what pleases me is that, it was the first case that one could demonstrate teaching in any other animal than ourselves, so the ants are incredibly special.

[Narrator]
As for the ants that found the less desirable nest, their reports are less enthusiastic. They solicit fewer tandem runners. Dr. Frank suspects that each ant has a basic concept of what makes a good home. So, more ants get recruited to the good nest enough to convince the colony as a whole. Within an hour or so the entire colony has moved.

[Dr. Nigel Franks]
And let me put this in a very anthropocentric terms that they will think, well it isn’t just me who thinks this nest site is good, all of my friends think it’s good too. So, by using not just their own individual opinions if you will, but the opinions of lots of their nest mates, they can form very accurate decisions.

Channel.nationalgeographic.com/wild/

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