Ants are known to use antennae to smell food and other ants. This is a way to explore the ocean world, but how do they use these antennas? This is what a new study has tried to reach, according to the New York Times.

Ants do not have anova, and their antennas are used to capture the path, relying on the pheromones (chemicals used by the ants to connect) left behind by other ants.

Scientists know a lot about ants, including their ability to track smells, but Harvard researchers wanted a more detailed understanding of how ants could smell or taste the pheromones.

Ants use antennas to capture the chemical signals left by other ants. This chemical sense, which can be described as smell, taste or chemical reception, can trace straight, curved, or even curvature paths.

Chemical signals (pheromones) allow the ants to track tracks of different forms (New York Times)

To see how the ants did this, the scientists mixed the ink with the ant vermons. They used the mixture to draw paths on paper and then put a string on the tracks, recorded dozens of hours of ants movement, analyzed the video and experimented with different computer models of ants behavior.

Ryan Drapett and his adviser Venkatesh Murthy and other researchers in their study, who published their findings in the Experimental Biology Journal, found that ants have many strategies for tracking paths.

All the ants used their antennas to sense the path from one side to another; one of the strategies they used was the "body", as the ant of the body moved slowly, keeping their antennas close together.

The researchers described another strategy, that the ants move slowly but took the winding paths moving away from the track and return to it, and called it "exploratory."

When it was placed in a course of pheromones, it moved more quickly, keeping its antennas on either side of the path, keeping one of the antennas closer to the path than the other, and called this strategy the name "track."

Ants differ in dependence on a specific antenna; some use the right and the other depends on the left (New York Times)

But, which of these two antennas used ants? This was different from an ant to another, in other words some of the ants were using the left antenna, some of which are used right, according to the newspaper.

Murthy sees the success of this experiment as evidence that researchers have found a good way to study navigation in ants in detail, and understanding the behavior of ants can be useful in building robots that have the ability of ants to explore the path and track paths.