Ants aboard the International Space Station showed they could still use teamwork in searching new areas even when floating away from the walls of their containers in the zero gravity conditions, scientists report.
The ants displayed a surprising ability to regain their footing after floating around in their containers, and "collective searching," although somewhat impeded, still occurred, researchers said.
"The ants showed an impressive ability to walk on the surface in microgravity, and an even more remarkable capacity to regain their contact with the surface once they were tumbling around in the air," they wrote in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
Such capabilities from the ants, sent to the space station on a supply rocket in January 2014, could guide scientists in developing algorithms that would allow groups of search-and-rescue robots to autonomously conduct effective cooperative exploration of an environment, the researchers said.
On the space station, eight groups of ants were housed in special habitats equipped with gates that could be opened into new areas of varying sizes for the ants to venture into and conduct collective searches to "learn" the new area.
"We had no idea what the ants would do," says study leader Deborah M. Gordon, a Stanford University biologist. "We didn't know if they would be able to search at all."
In smaller spaces, the ants could search thoroughly, aware they were in a smaller area because they would keep bumping into each other, the researchers noted.
In a larger area, the ants would move apart and use straighter search paths to maximize their search coverage of the new area.
Even in microgravity, they showed the ability to maintain contact while they crawled, and if they floated off the walls of the habitats they displayed a "remarkable ability" to get their feet back onto a solid surface, Gordon says.
"Sometimes they would grab onto another ant and climb back down... And sometimes, they somehow managed to just flatten themselves back onto the surface," she says. "I think the biomechanics of that are interesting."
However, despite their best efforts, the ants' collective searches in zero gravity were somewhat hampered, Gordon acknowledges.
"The ants didn't do as well as they might have in microgravity," she says. "I think that's partly because the effort to hold on led to them moving more slowly, and so they didn't have a chance to cover the ground as thoroughly."
That shouldn't be a surprise, she says; although at least one species of the 14,000 kinds of ants on Earth can be found living happily in every ecological niche on the planet, that's not much preparation for the conditions found in space.
"There's not been a lot of evolution to shape their collective search in microgravity," she says.
