What sets animals apart from machines is their exceptional resilience to sensory impairment. Yet the mechanisms behind this ability remain a mystery.
Antoine Wystrach, Sebastian Schwarz, Leo Clement (CRCA-CBI) and their colleagues have explored this question in desert ants, and have revealed how these ants compensate for visual loss through a rapid relearning process.
In this study, they temporarily ‘blindfolded’ ants trained to recognise a road in their natural environment, and analysed their ability to overcome this difficulty and resume normal activity, comparing their reactions with those predicted by established scientific models.
The half-blinded ants initially showed considerable disorientation. But amazingly, they adapted in record time: in just a few hours, these ants recovered the functional behaviour observed in naïve ants seeing the world for the first time.
This result goes far beyond the capabilities predicted by current models, which lack the necessary compensation processes.
These results could inspire technological advances to improve the resilience of artificial or biological systems.
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