r/todayilearned • u/Prefix-NA • Dec 05 '16
Frequent Repost: Removed TIL scientists attached stilts to the legs of ants to prove that ants return to their nests by counting their steps. The ants with stilts overshot their nest by roughly 50% due to the new length of their steps.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/06/060629-ants-stilts.html9
u/AcrolloPeed Dec 05 '16 edited Dec 05 '16
Adding stilts to the legs of spiders only made them more terrifying.
Edit: this seemed appropriate
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u/Prefix-NA Dec 05 '16
Whats more terrifying is that some guys job is to put stilts on ants.
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u/SaltiestPotato Dec 05 '16
"...in our next experiment we tried to re-create these results with spiders. Our conclusion..."
*changes slide to a picture of a spider on stilts*
*audience screams*
"...spiders are terrifying and we regret everything."
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u/digitalinfidel Dec 05 '16
Do they walk like dogs with shoes on?
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u/Coffee-Anon Dec 05 '16
If I were to guess, I'd say they walk more like ants with stilts on.
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u/urbanek2525 Dec 05 '16
Guy: "Hi, I'm a graduate student in the Biology department. Working on my Masters."
Her: "What did you do today?"
Guy: "Glued little tiny stilts to ant's legs so they'd get lost and die."
Her: "Check please."
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Dec 05 '16
Guy: "Oh I forgot, I also amputated their legs."
Her: "A+"
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u/JKL-39 Dec 05 '16
Guy: "That's not all. I attached a plastic beer-dispensing helmet on top of every one of em."
Her: "Full scholarship, coming right up"
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Dec 05 '16
Guy: "And I even stomped on the ants right after I was done."
Her: "Please fuck me."
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u/Dar_Winning Dec 05 '16
I had a friend who got a job in a lab after getting her bachelors in something science related (can't remember exactly what). She spent an entire month pulling the wings off of fruit flies. On her last day, she sneezed in the dish where she kept all of the specimens and had to start her research again from scratch.
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u/MEffinDaniels Dec 05 '16
That's a really long time to work on a fruit fly population... Drosophila (most commonly used fruit fly in research) only live about a month under the best conditions.
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u/feed_mememes Dec 05 '16
Her: "That sounded so hot! Can't wait for him to tear my legs apart too"
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u/manaworkin Dec 05 '16
"I tested a hypothesis suggesting that ants know how to count"
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u/Korrasch Dec 05 '16
That's the difference between someone who is socially awkward and someone who is confident. A confident person would say something braggadocios and make themselves sound impressive, whereas I would do what you said originally.
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u/Donald_Keyman 7 Dec 05 '16
graduate student in the biology department
confident, braggadocious person
It seems we have an input error Jim
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u/veggie151 Dec 05 '16
Braggadocios is the noun, braggadocious is the adjective. They're both Seussical and archaic.
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u/11ForeverAlone11 Dec 05 '16
when you hear the sound of it, it's really quite atrocious
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u/SomeMysteriousChunk Dec 05 '16
are we just using the word braggadocious now
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u/NinjaRedditorAtWork Dec 05 '16
It's gonna be in the American vernacular for the foreseeable future, bigly.
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u/oxideseven Dec 05 '16
Am I the only one that took the "check please" reply as the girl being freaked out and leaving ASAP?
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u/FattyCorpuscle Dec 05 '16
To find out, scientists attached tiny stilts to some insects and half-amputated others.
That went from funny to fucked in 0.25 seconds.
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u/HerpingtonDerpDerp Dec 05 '16
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u/elmuchocapitano Dec 05 '16
“I have a Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics," she adds. "If you would have told me then that in 20 years I’d be creating movies for insects, I never would have believed you."
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Dec 05 '16
My favorite part of the article was...
Her: "Wanna Netflix and Chill?"
Him: "Uh..."
Her: "I have mantises!"
Him: "Well..."
Her: "They have 3D vision!"
Him: "So hot."
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u/spock_block Dec 05 '16
Honestly this VR thing is getting out of hand.
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u/Starklet Dec 05 '16
A fucking praying mantis gets to use VR before me! Wtf science?
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u/swd120 Dec 05 '16
And how do you determine if they can see in 3d from that... Try and get them to respond to stuff thats not there?
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u/Donald_Keyman 7 Dec 05 '16
The next bit is important though
This procedure, Wolf said, is not as cruel as it sounds, because ants do not experience pain, "at least not in a sense even remotely comparable to what we mean by that term."
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u/pbrooks19 Dec 05 '16
This sounds like the beginning of a great horror film.
We've cut the legs off these ants to test their ability to count steps, but it means nothing to these ants. It's all in a day's work for us scientists.
<The sound of scuttling grows in the distance...>
Heavens, Dr. Billingsley, its a huge swarm of half-legged ants coming right at us! Aaaaaarrrrrrrrraaahhhh!
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u/dalgeek Dec 05 '16
Heavens, Dr. Billingsley, its a huge swarm of half-legged ants coming right at us! Aaaaaarrrrrrrrraaahhhh!
At least they'll only be able to run at half speed, easier to escape from.
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u/cheers_grills Dec 05 '16
Ant TV:
We've cut the legs off these humans to test their ability to count steps, but it means nothing to them. It's all in a day's work for us scientists.
<The sound of scuttling grows in the distance...>
Heavens, Dr. Billingsley, its a huge swarm of half-legged humans coming right at us! Aaaaaarrrrrrrrraaahhhh!
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u/mightyandpowerful Dec 05 '16
I'm pretty skeptical about that claim. They used to say that all kinds of things couldn't feel pain, like dogs and babies.
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u/Htzlptzly Dec 05 '16
Neither humans, that sound they make when you crush them is just air coming out of their insides.
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u/shandymare Dec 05 '16
Is that certain? I'd want to be 100% sure that was true before I cut off some creature's legs.
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u/GWJYonder Dec 05 '16
Some quick googling didn't uncover sources of this, but I'm not sure if that's just because I don't have the biology vocabulary to find what I'm looking for quickly, or because what I'm about to say is unsubstantiated.
I have read that there are two broad types of pain signals in mammals, one of those being the "ouch ouch this hurts make it stop" and the other being a more passive transmission of the fact that damage is being done, but without the very unpleasant additional overtones.
The article said that some pain relief targeted both pathways, and those were the ones that made you numb, and others only targeted the unpleasant one, for example if you had your wisdom teeth removed you may have been able to feel the grinding, pulling, and tugging, and known basically what was going on, but it didn't actually hurt.
The article went on to say that only mammals had the physical nerve endings for the pain signal, in addition to the more mechanical one, which was developed very far back and is shared by insects, fish etc.
The point of the article was that fish couldn't feel our type of pain, and thus fishing, catch and release, etc, wasn't actually that harmful for them. Once again, I don't know if that's actually based in fact, or just mumbo jumbo to explain why no one has to feel bad about piercing hooks through fish faces.
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u/Gehwartzen Dec 05 '16
Glad were at the top of the scientific experimentation food chain..
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u/Sir_Mumbleton Dec 05 '16
When I read 'half amputated' the image of ants with only 3 legs struggling to reach their nests crawled through my head.
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u/abecedorkian Dec 05 '16
I imagined ants with their legs just dangling there hanging by a tiny little thread of exoskeleton.
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u/SaintVanilla Dec 05 '16
Plus, if I tore your legs off, you would look like snowmen
Dr. Mitch Hedberg
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Dec 05 '16
Meanwhile, near the nest one of the other ants looks puzzled:
"Hey, where is the costume party?"
"Pal, it's been a rough day, leave us alone..."
"But are you not dressed as the seven dwarfs? maybe snowmen?"
"Go see the queen, pal" (idiomatic phrase ants use in place of "fuck you")
"Come on, there IS a costume party somewhere! I have just seen a guy dressed up as spiderANT scuttling by!"
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u/apullin Dec 05 '16
In our lab in Berkeley, someone used an ablation laser to selectivly remove the foot pads and foot features from cockroaches to test their effectiveness.
They also amputated roach legs, and showed that they can still be quite mobile with only 3 or even 2 legs. That is shown in the video, right in the next segment.
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u/Y_dilligaf Dec 05 '16
Well sure they had to amputate some of the ants....where do you think they got the ant stilts from??
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Dec 05 '16
"Oh, they don't feel pain, not like we do."
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Dec 05 '16
"It's actually far worse than how we experience it. Oh well."
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u/docmartens Dec 05 '16
Because they are so small, seconds seem to stretch thousands of years for them. A child with a magnifying glass is capable of filling an entire circle of hell with punished insects.
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u/justin_tino Dec 05 '16
If it makes you feel any better you probably kill many ants per day from walking or driving. Your house is built on a colony of ants that killed them all.
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u/dick-nipples Dec 05 '16
"What are these, stilts for ants?!"
-- the person who made the stilts, showing them to their scientist buddies with a big smile on their face while looking around for somebody laughing
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u/brazilliandanny Dec 05 '16
Not as scientific as you might think, they actually just glued toothbrush bristles on their legs
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u/Hullabalooga Dec 05 '16
They must have been so relieved their hypothesis turned out correct, cause you'd feel like such a dumbass if it wasn't..
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u/Donald_Keyman 7 Dec 05 '16 edited Dec 05 '16
Eh, it's a pretty thin line. The hypothesis was clever either way.
The two guys who discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation were so dumbfounded at their data that they manually cleaned the antenna thinking it was because of bird poop.
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u/RealParity Dec 05 '16
were so dumbfounded at their data that they manually cleaned it
Cleaned the data or actually cleaned bird poop from the equipement?
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u/distgenius Dec 05 '16
The equipment. The results were so unexpected that the first reaction was that something must be wrong with the equipment.
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u/inkyllama Dec 05 '16
This is what I really love about science; so many of the big break-through discoveries were accidents. A history of scientists swearing at their machines and double-checking that they didn't plug the thing in backwards.
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u/DragonMeme Dec 05 '16
The guys who discovered the CMB weren't even looking for it.
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u/cheers_grills Dec 05 '16
Why was it so dumbfounding?
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u/0000010000000101 Dec 05 '16
When Penzias and Wilson reduced their data they found a low, steady, mysterious noise that persisted in their receiver. This residual noise was 100 times more intense than they had expected, was evenly spread over the sky, and was present day and night. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_cosmic_microwave_background_radiation
That implies that it doesn't come from the earth, our sun or our galaxy, is probably universal and older than or as old as the universe. There is basically a radio field with an impossible source unless that source is the formation of the universe. Otherwise it would come from somewhere that we could locate because we could measure its propagation, but it's just there, always.
This is a critical piece of evidence for the big bang and was a totally unexpected discovery. It fit into some existing models of the time but no one had tested for it successfully as it was believed to be orders less intense than it turned out was true.
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Dec 05 '16 edited Dec 05 '16
I'd feel like an asshole.
So, yeah, we half amputated you ants to see how you guys worked based on a theory we have. Turns out you don't, so, yeah, good news is you guys get to keep the stilts! Actually, we're going to need those back. Turns out tiny stilts are not cheap.
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u/SamMaghsoodloo Dec 05 '16
Kinda, but in science no result is still a result. Scientists are comfortable with a hypothesis not being true, it's just part of the game.
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u/GunPoison Dec 05 '16
Maybe the little guys were just having way too much fun to go home? Who didn't love stilts as a kid.
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u/chrispey_kreme Dec 05 '16
Ya I heard having your legs cut in half is a blast.
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u/edjrage Dec 05 '16
I don't know about stilts, but I definitely remember my uncle chopping my legs off as if it were today. BEST. DAY. EVER.
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u/somer3dditguy Dec 05 '16
Couldn't you just pick up the ants and move them 50% closer to the nest, and then see if they still overshoot it by 50%?
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u/dick-nipples Dec 05 '16
Yes, but then you wouldn't get to put stilts on the ants.
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u/jrm2007 Dec 05 '16
Maybe the experiment originally was to see if you could put stilts on ants (ala Step Brothers if you get the reference) and it was only then that they noticed the overshooting of nest.
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u/Duuhh_LightSwitch Dec 05 '16
That doesn't necessarily show they were counting steps though. Moving them could have messed with some other way-finding variable
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u/somer3dditguy Dec 05 '16
So could stilts. They could be higher above any ground pheromones, and not smell them as easily, so they keep walking further. If they cut their legs in half, they don't walk as far because their legs are hurting.
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u/spanktastic2120 Dec 05 '16
You could put stilts on them, let them learn the number of stilted steps it takes to get back to the nest, and then trim the stilts to adjust step size. That would test the legs-are-hurting hypothesis. With various stilt sizes you could correlate step-size with nest-overshoot to fairly conclusively show they do indeed count steps.
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u/Trashcanman33 Dec 05 '16
And how does picking them up and attaching stilts not run the same risk?
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u/SureSignOfAGoodRhyme Dec 05 '16
Move the nest instead, then we aren't messing with the ants. Watch for when they start pacing.
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u/davidgballentine Dec 05 '16
Did anyone else just open this to look at ants with stilts on?
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Dec 05 '16
WE'VE DONE IT! WE'VE INVENTED SPIDERS!
No spiders already exist
Oh
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u/SaladTim Dec 05 '16
Also they would still be classified as insects. 6 long legs is still 6 legs
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Dec 05 '16
I would have loved to have sat on the committee that approved that research.
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u/Donald_Keyman 7 Dec 05 '16 edited Dec 05 '16
"Idk, it seems like it could be a good idea but I do NOT want to be grabbing and pissing off a bunch of ants"
"Hahaha of course not, we'll have the undergrads do it."
"Approved."
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Dec 05 '16
Seriously a conversation had by just about every research group at some point.
Hmmm.. This is gonna suck....
THAT SOUNDS LIKE A JOB FOR A SUMMER STUDENT! XD
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u/StuffyUnicorn Dec 05 '16
In addition to TIL, this could fall under Mildly Anteresting as well
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Dec 05 '16 edited Dec 06 '16
How does this prove that ants count their steps? Could it be that they measure the time they walked and with stilts they move 50% farther in the same time?
Edit: Thanks for all the comment. I upvoted Svankensen fo the suggestion to read the paper and andreasbeer1981 because he did read the article and answered the question.
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Dec 05 '16
We should adjust the ants' watches so they are 1.5x normal speed to test this hypothesis.
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u/Svankensen Dec 05 '16
Probably not precisely, since the time it takes for a step is affected by length (thelonger a pendulum is the longer it takes to complete a cycle). Anyway, we better read the paper to see their methodology
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u/g_squidman Dec 05 '16
It may be the same thing. How does an art count time? It would probably have to associate it with a sense of a steady beat. They don't have metronomes, seconds, stop watches, or heart beats. They'd probably still keep a sense of time with their footsteps.
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u/niconpat Dec 05 '16
If they timed their walk it wouldn't be a measure of distance. It wouldn't take into account speed of walking or any stoppages along the way. Assuming their stride is always the same length, counting steps is a perfect measure of distance.
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u/styrofoam_moose Dec 05 '16
I know it's semantics, but scientists never "prove" anything anyways, they simply gather evidence to support a theory/hypothesis.
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u/andreasbeer1981 Dec 05 '16
It doesn't at all. That's what the article says in the end as well. In my opinion it is rather like a recursive algorithm, which doesn't need counting at all, just a nested memory. And the beauty of it: you don't need to count time or steps, just a bit of geometry when your making turns. So the probably hardwired the pythagorean equation, but I guess that all animals have that.
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u/itseasytorecall Dec 05 '16
That moment when you realize billions and billions of ants have the ability to count while there are still probably a minority of adult humans out there who literally can't...
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u/Maester_Tinfoil Dec 05 '16
That's just ridiculous. I have zero taller ants for these kind of scientists!
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u/moeburn Dec 05 '16
Interesting philosophy discussion.
If I squash a spider with my shoe, most people wouldn't care.
If I squash a cat with my car, most people would agree this is cruel.
But if I take a spider and start attaching tiny stilts to its legs to see what it does, some people start to think this might be cruel.
If I take a spider and start pulling off its legs one by one to see how it reacts while it is still alive, we're getting into definitely cruel territory here.
But if I do the same on a microscopic level with an amoeba's motility, almost nobody would care.
Where does our line get drawn?
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u/Raschwolf Dec 05 '16
Most people I believe would base the morality on a balance of sentience/ability to suffer, and on the speed with which the creature is dispatched.
Do bugs feel pain? Probably, but I really don't know. Most people though don't even think about it, unless they see a bug in torment (legs pulled off, trying to crawl away).
If I smash a bug with my shoe, it's life ends in an instant. No suffering. And let's face it, bugs are not held in high esteem, and they are not highly valued, (not in small numbers anyway).
Amoeba's don't feel pain, at least not to my knowledge. So ripping one apart would not be any more cruel then trimming your lawn.
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u/JnnyRuthless Dec 05 '16
The rule/consensus tends to be if it's a mammal and (at least in the western world) could be a pet, it's off limits. Anything else "doesn't feel pain like you or I perceive it." I'm not saying that is accurate or not, I'm no biologist. Just see that rationale used again and again.
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u/SaikenWorkSafe Dec 05 '16
The meeting that this idea was pitched...
Hey guys, let's put stilts on ants.
Everyone else: squinty eyes
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u/promethazoid Dec 05 '16
Does that mean by playing with bugs as a child I was inadvertently increasing ant homelessness?
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u/cefm Dec 05 '16
Or maybe they just took the long way home because they were too embarrassed to let their friends see them wearing those ridiculous shoes.
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u/CasualCocaine Dec 05 '16
Humans fucking with less sentient creatures for science. Love it. I wish it was a show.
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u/GopherAtl Dec 05 '16
Do "reality tv stars" meet your criteria for "less sentient creatures?" 'cause if so, you have an embarrassment of options for watching that show!
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u/SGTBookWorm Dec 05 '16
can "an embarrassment" be the quantifying term for a group of reality tv stars?
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u/jhutchi2 Dec 06 '16
Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.
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u/Chadlyradly Dec 05 '16 edited Dec 05 '16
Glad you learned this today, it's pretty neat. I also learned this roughly a year ago from a post with the same title!! What are the odds?!?!
"TIL scientists attached stilts to the legs of ants to prove that ants return to their nests by counting their steps. The ants with stilts overshot their nest by roughly 50% due to the new length of their steps"
OP /u/StarrGust
Edit: Lmao at all the "no one cares if it's a repost" comments. Yeah I agree, if it's getting upvoted then clearly not a lot of people saw it and it's worth a repost. The problem here is that they used the exact same title as the original and didn't even credit the OP. At least credit the person you clearly copied and who got you all the damn upvotes, Jesus.
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u/MaiPhet Dec 05 '16
They could have just shouted random numbers at the ants to fuck up their count.
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u/GoredonTheDestroyer Dec 05 '16
500! 46! 392! TWELVE! Twelve always fucks them up.
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u/TheGreatBeardedGiant Dec 05 '16
I don't care if it makes front page once a month. The idea is some scientists staying up all night frantically making tiny stilts for ants always makes me smile.
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Dec 05 '16
TIL humans will fuck with literally anything for their own amusement or scientific experiments.
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Dec 05 '16
This doesn't prove they have pedometers at all, could be the ants are able to cover more distance on stilts and overestimate the time they'll have to walk to reach the hive.
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u/death_by_chocolate Dec 05 '16
Poor ants. Lost in the wilderness. "Hey!? Where the fuck are we anyway? And what's wrong with our legs? HELP!"
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u/Minstrel47 Dec 06 '16
TIL I learned Scientist can be real assholes to animals to test out their theories.
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Dec 06 '16
fucking idiots
ants are so stupid we give them too much credit. idiot didn't even know he had to compensate for the extra length on his legs
ants can't even do math lmao fucking dumbasses
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u/Sam_Mack Dec 06 '16
TIL that after having stilts attached to their legs, ants felt pretty embarrassed and wouldn't go home.
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u/ReadyToBeGreatAgain Dec 05 '16
"Ants do not experience pain"
And we know this because...
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u/walkin_the_labyrinth Dec 05 '16
This is nothing to the study with the ants with the teeny tiny Rollerblades.
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u/Phone_Ruberband Dec 05 '16
Coming to a theater near you in 2017: Ants don't go to Clown College
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u/mackduck Dec 05 '16
'What did you do today at work Mummmy'? Tied stilts to the legs of ants darling'
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u/blakespot Dec 05 '16
Think how fucked up that ant felt on those stilts -- seriously.
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Dec 05 '16
Ok, but why couldn't it just be based on their perception of time? When you make bigger steps with stilted legs, you would get there sooner and therefore overshoot by keeping walking until the time spent seems right. When you make smaller steps, it would take longer and they would undershoot.
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u/Pterodactylll Dec 05 '16
How would you count if you didn't know what numbers were?
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u/GongTheHawkEye Dec 05 '16
Holy shit, I had to learn about this for a Bio assignment. Shit was a pain in the ass.
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u/Flobarooner Dec 05 '16
All those times my science teachers tried to convince me to get into a career in science and I said "nah, it's boring." All they needed to do was show me this.
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u/Stinner_03 Dec 05 '16
If the ants move in seemingly random pathways to find food but then return to their nests in straight pathways, how does helping steps count? Wouldn't both the searching and returning paths require the same number of steps? But that isn't the case.
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u/Ericgzg Dec 05 '16
Did they as least also give stilts to the ants whose legs they cut off after the experiment was over?
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u/unrepentant_fenian Dec 05 '16
I can barely use chopsticks, how the F do you glue extensions onto ant legs!
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u/m0nkie98 Dec 05 '16
I think leaf cutter ants are so cool. They collect leaves as fertilizers to grow a special type of fungus to feed the colony.. Fungus dies, colony dies..
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u/Dwarfgo Dec 06 '16
Huh, I think I'm having deja vu. I'm pretty sure I saw this post last year and probably a year before that as well.
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u/wowdruid1 Dec 06 '16
I believe there is research that suggests crabs do this too (ghost crabs?).
Source: Attended a lecture about the exact topic at university. Sorry not sure of the paper.
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Dec 06 '16
so pretty much they're suggesting ants count their steps? they have that memory ability? they tally that shit and count down? lol crazy
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u/Astrocatwuvsyou Dec 06 '16
I wonder if any of the scientists questioned what the fuck they're doing with their lives as they tied tiny stilts to ants legs.
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u/Mark239 Dec 06 '16
"Putting stilts on ants" sounds like a southern expression for something tedious. "I tell ya what, gettin that boy to do an honest days work is like puttin stilts on an ant"
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u/poormilk Dec 06 '16
I always wonder who funded this study and why. I just laugh so hard imaging some grant proposal writer and some PHD's going over the logistics of how to build shoes for ants and then getting them on the ants.
How the fuck do you build shoes for ants??? Who is paying for this????
Also what do you have to drug the ants to get them to be docile enough to put shoes on them??? What types of tests have to be done on the ants to figure out that is the correct dosage.
Or are they designing their own ant holding apparatus???
Soooooo many questions....
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u/aguilartx Dec 06 '16
Why stop at little stilts? I wanna see if tiny Healy's get them there 50% faster.
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u/KwyjiboTheGringo Dec 06 '16
Now make a thread called: "TIL scientists cut the legs of ants into stumps to prove that ants return to their nests by counting their steps. The ants with stumps undershot their nest by roughly 50% due to the new length of their steps."
It will be full of people crying about the cruelty done to those poor ants, because most people just read the title.
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Dec 06 '16
I want to be an accountant for a scientist.
"Sir, your budget consists entirely of ant stilts?" You'll want to diversify those stilts of you want to see some real positive growth from your investments.
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u/StaplerOfMilton Dec 06 '16
"Alright, Jim. You have an idea for an ant experiment yet?" "Uh, yeah! Yes, yes, I...I do. I have an idea for an ant experiment." whispered (goddamn it, I'm STILL thinking!) "What was that, Jim? You're still what?" "Uh...not still...Stilts. Stilts! Ants on stilts!" "Brilliant, Jim! Just brilliant! Now we'll know for sure if they count their steps to make it back to their home!" "Yes! That was intentional!"
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u/Donald_Keyman 7 Dec 05 '16 edited Dec 05 '16
So if I shout numbers at them while they are walking will they get lost?