Ants successfully adapt to microgravity in ISS experiment

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

Even in the microgravity environment of the International Space Station, ants are able to adapt to their conditions and continue searching collectively, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

As part of the study, Discovery News explains, eight groups of ants travelled to the ISS in 2014 so that they could be observed trying to perform searches in space. The goal was to find out more about how the insects responded to such a drastic change in their environment.

Ants in space (and no, that’s not an upcoming Sharknado spinoff)

While on the space station, a group of pavement ants (Tetramorium caespitum) were given a small arena to explore in which a barrier was lowered in order to increase the nest area while reducing the ant density. This gave the ants more room to explore without bumping into each other, Stanford University biologist Deborah M. Gordon and her colleagues explained.

“In microgravity, relative to ground controls, ants explored the area less thoroughly and took more convoluted paths,” the authors wrote. “It appears that the difficulty of holding on to the surface interfered with the ants’ ability to search collectively. Ants frequently lost contact with the surface, but showed a remarkable ability to regain contact with the surface.”

When in smaller spaces, the ants know that they can search more thoroughly because they keep running into one another, Gordon said. Once they opened the barrier and gave them more ground to cover, the ants realized that they had more space to search and responded accordingly.

Even ants struggle to keep their footing in space

By monitoring the activity of the ants, the researchers found that the insects kept losing hold of the walls, and would also lose their sense of how much space needed to be searched. Even so, the creatures were able to continue searching collectively. They just did it differently than they do on Earth, and they seemed to have a knack for regaining contact with the container’s surface.

Gordon’s team now hopes to simulate the experiment using different ant species. As they explained, “By repeating this experiment on Earth with different species of ants, we are likely to discover many new distributed algorithms for collective search, and to learn about how evolution has shaped collective behavior in response to local conditions.”

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