Ants, math and Ferret.

Fromt the desk of Ferret/Slackpunch Christopher 

"Every ant counts in large amounts, eh?

A lot of animals are pretty good at simple math, not just show-off horses and junked-out chimpanzees, and one of the most impressively unexpected number-crunchers of the animal kingdom is Cataglyphis fortis, an ant that lives in the Tunisian desert known for using higher maths in a way that makes me embarrassingly glad to have thumbs and a consolatory affinity for language.

 When a desert ant leaves its nest in search of food, its most crucial task is finding its way home.  Most ants around the world can use one of two tricks for finding their way home:  visual landmarks or scent trails.  The windswept saltpans of Tunisia make it impossible to leave a scent trail, though, and the barren landscape doesn't provide much in the way of visual landmarks—an occasional rock or scrappy weed.  Evolutionarily supplied with mathematical know-how, the desert ant is able to “path integrate,” meaning that it’s able to continuously compute its present location from its past trajectory and consequentially to return to the starting point by choosing the direct route rather than retracing its outbound trajectory.  This was figured out by ant navigation researchers Martin Muller and Rudiger Wehner, two dudes with more time on their hands than even these ants, who calculate the distance walked by the insane expedient of counting their steps.  This was discovered by strapping stilts made of pig hairs onto the legs of the ants (and I’d love to know how many tries it took to accomplish that tweaky shit).  The ant’s stilts made each individual step longer than it would have otherwise been, making them overestimate the distance home—a cruel prank, really, but it was For Science.  The ants calculate the direction they walk by calculating the angle of their path relative to the position of the sun, using trigonometry—a discipline well above my pay grade as far as math goes, though I dare say I could probably pull off the same trick without actual calculations, just eyeballing it and accepting the slight margin of potential error:  I’m so much bigger than the ant that it’s less important for my heading to be dead accurate for me to find my house.  Additionally, the ants constantly update their calculations to correct for the sun’s march across the sky.  Considering their nervous system is comprised of as few as 250,000 neurons (compared to the approximately 85 billion neurons in the human), I believe that’s a pretty efficient use of neurons; I kind of have to, though, as the logical alternative is accepting that we are horribly inefficient users of neurons.  

 Ironically, it seems my big advanced brain might actually be a hindrance in my comprehension of math; being able to anticipate a future, to worry about myself and my prospects, and to overthink the implications of different creatures’ variable brain-size-to-brain-usage ratios all may contribute to an inability to focus on what should be relatively easy concepts…a lack of confidence in my ability to eventually master any maths more difficult than making change and times tables…and a sort of sour-grapes attitude (“Who cares if I know what a sine is, or if I can plot artillery azimuths in my head? That shit’s probably not useful anyway, at least not to me”) which is unhealthy in general, and highly corrosive to the motivation grokking more complex math requires.

 I already knew I liked ants, found them interesting, admirable, organised creatures whose hive structure and apparent mindlessness in no way seemed to detract from the efficacy of their society, nor did it rob them of the dignity of their engineering achievements, their sacrifices and compassion during the incessant warring with other colonies of their own kind and other marauding species, ant or otherwise.  Tireless and pragmatic, they’ve always made humanity’s progress—its edifices, environmental alterations, philosophies, and trivial conveniences—seem like the hamfisted flailing of a vaguely lucky breed of large ungulate.  

 No, you never want them encroaching into your habitat; sure, they’re small, usually pretty harmless to people, and if they’re dirty in some way, you wouldn’t know it to look at them…like I said, small, and once you busted out a jewelers’ loupe and got one to sit still long enough to look it over, I think you’d find they’re fairly fastidious, not just commonly encased in a chitinous exoskeleton that comes in a colour that typically doesn’t show dirt well.  But somehow, once they’ve used their ludicrous sense of smell (4-5 times the odor receptors as most other insects, capable of detecting food from miles away, it’s said) to find whatever you might’ve left on the kitchen counter overnight, and swarmed all over it, the food still seems defiled, somehow…even if you go through the nerve-wracking and laborious process of removing every ant from the food in question, it seems inedible.  Upon hearing that millions of people around the world, as well as many, many species of animal life, eat ants (which are incidentally higher in protein than chicken eggs) without thinking twice—sometimes even considering them a delicacy, coating them in chocolate and shit—it seems dumb that the ants’ having touched one’s food, or having helped themselves to infinitesimal amounts of it without leaving marks visible to our naked eye, should freak us out so much we just scoop up whatever they got into wholesale and throw it in the outside garbage.  I do, though, and I’m not alone.

 What prompted that culinary aside..? Oh, yes, I’ve always liked ants, just not enough not to massacre them when they show up and fuck up my Chewy Chips Ahoy or half-eaten quesadilla…and now that I know some of them regularly perform functions that I, as a hominid with a penchant for taking CNS stimulants who’s clocked nearly two hundred thousand miles on foot in the course of his forty-plus years of adventures, could become virtually fetishistic about…let’s just say that a well-developed colony of any ants, but particularly Cataglyphis fortis, would doubtlessly do a better job running this country than some recent aspirants, putting them in the good company of other extraordinary members of Earth’s hugely variegated selection of faunæ.  Examples? Yes, fine, these ants are potentially as smart as:  a cat that can learn to climb a ladder; any dolphin with the wherewithal not to just hump things all day; a lowland gorilla who doesn’t have to be a Democrat (but should be willing to get in bed with them when it’s necessary); a sea lion that can play Eugene Bozza’s En Forêt; your average Asian-American female “Mathletes” champion; her Shih Tzu; two crows; a pig possessed by the spirit of a British juvenile delinquent who died in an accident at a reformatory; a West Highland terrier in a self-made exo-suit; that fucking Jack Russell from Fraser; an underground fungus the size of two American football fields; Lord Nibbler; that bear from The Edge; a squirrel with a high-school freshman’s chemistry textbook swiped off a bus bench; and a swarm of gnats that spent a summer at The Learning Annex, boning up on Kabbalah-dating, soap-making, and the absurdly intricate workings of the American electoral college."