麻豆传媒

Tread near an ants鈥� nest and the ants will come pouring out to defend their
queen. But how do they mobilise so quickly? Richard Brown at Mississippi State
University and Robert Hickling of Sonometrics in Huntington Woods, Michigan,
think they communicate distress using a high-pitched scraping sound, but now
Flavio Roces and J眉rgen Tautz of the University of W眉rzburg in Germany
say they鈥檙e wrong鈥攂ecause ants are deaf. In the Journal of the American
Acoustical Society (vol 109, p 3080) Roces and Tautz calculate that sensory
hairs on ants鈥� antennae are too stiff to detect sound coming from an ant a few
millimetres away. Brown and Hickling are sticking to their guns. 鈥淗airs do
respond to touch and vibration because their base is in a flexible socket,鈥�
Brown says.