Click here for a special offer. Click here for our free newsletter. Nearly every third grader is familiar with tales of an ant's ability to lift 50 times its weight. But the mighty insects are hardly all brawn, no brains.
Ants can claim impressive navigational skills, too.
In the wild, ants cannot rely on scent trails to guide them, as they do in the kitchen. Instead, they compute their net distance and direction traveled, which enables them to return directly home after retrieving supper. They also can memorize the visual landmarks along the journey's twists and turns. Researchers at England's Sussex Centre for Neuroscience are beginning to figure out how ants integrate these two strategies. In last week's journal Nature, the researchers reveal that desert ants prefer the visual landmark method, since the cluttered terrain can turn the direct route into a mammoth trek over rock and scrub.