Ants don’t have big brains, but they’re pretty good at maths. Researchers
have found that they can calculate the area of a potential nesting site with an
error of less than 2 per cent.
Eamonn Mallon and his colleagues from the University of Bath found that when
the ants first visit the site, they walk around it randomly, leaving behind them
a scent pheromone trail of a fixed length. On a second visit, the Leptothorax
albipennis ants wander around again. The less often they encounter the original
scented trail, the bigger the site (Behavioural Ecology, vol 12, p
655).…
