The Column - March 2009 - (Page 8)

News News The Column www.thecolumn.eu.com March 2009 Smells like ants When people get lost in the desert they are well known for walking in circles in the featureless terrain. But how creatures indigenous to that part of the world can find their way has been something of a mystery to scientists. Research published in open access journal Frontiers in Zoology shows that desert ants from the inhospitable saltpans of Tunisia input both local smells and visual cues into their navigation systems to guide them home.1 The process they use was identified after scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, used gas chromatography to verify that desert microhabitats have unique odour signatures that can guide the ants. The use of environmentally derived olfactory landmarks has been shown for pigeons, while most ants rely rather on selfgenerated pheromone trails. However these ants roam for over 100 metres in search of food in a habitat where high temperatures and changeable food locations make pheromone trails ineffective. Despite its homogenous appearance, the flat ground within the saltpan habitat differs slightly in its soil structure. Covered by a continuous salt crust, the surface is occasionally interrupted by clefts or by pieces of wood and halophytic plants and the signs of past periods of flooding. To check whether these structures result in different habitat odours, gas chromatography was used to analyse headspace samples of continuous salt crust, cleft salt crust, wood and halophytic plants. The emitted volatiles for each sample were relatively constant over two consecutive days, whereas the chromatograms differed among the samples, which mean they present potential olfactory landmarks. After having identified some odours the researchers trained ants in field experiments to recognize ones pointing to a hidden nest entrance. Ants learned to associate their nest entrance with a single odour and discriminated the training odour against non-training odours. They even picked out the training odour from a four-odour blend. “We are amazed to discover that while keeping track of the path integrator and learning visual landmarks, these ants can also collect information about the olfactory world,” said Knaden, who hopes to investigate the interaction between visual and olfactory information in future research. 1. K. Steck, B.S. Hansson and M. Knaden, Frontiers in Zoology, 6(5), (2009). 8 Don Farrall/Getty Images http://www.thecolumn.eu.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Column - March 2009

The Column - March 2009
Contents
Cover Story: Incognito
News
Market Trends and Analysis
Rapid Large Volume Injection/GC–MS Analysis of Pesticides in Food Prepared by the QuEChERS Method
An SPE-LC–MS–MS Method for Analysing Antidepressants and their Metabolites in Plasma

The Column - March 2009

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