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I’m not sure… ants walk really far. Think of how long it takes us to get human children to the point where they can count to 1000. Do ants just hatch with a sense of numbers?
I don't see why not. Storing a count is not so complex and the animal kingdom is filled with impressive (to our perception) mental feats* (like the dedicated neurones for each octopus tentacles).
Ironically, I find the act of following a pheromone trail counting steps way simpler than them having detailed mappings of their surroundings.
Edit: fears -> feats
The next question is going to be what the maximum number of steps an ant can store is and what happens when it overflows...
I think you're approaching it too much like a computer scientist. I don't think that organic brains have hard limits like that, or stack overflow, etc.
Woosh
I'm wondering if the "counting" could be derived from a form of proprioception rather than maintaining an active count. Distance just gets scaled and thrown off by longer legs.
You don’t need a sense of numbers, in the abstract mathematical way humans use, to count.
Maybe a human child can’t count to 1000 but they could be taught to put a BB inside a jar every step they take. Then they can take a BB back out of the jar at every step on the way back. When the jar is empty, they’re near home. Even if they can’t count at all, they can keep track of thousands of steps this way given enough attention span and stamina.
Then, just imagine, instead of a BB’s in a jar it’s some chemical signal in the brain.
Maybe its less like a number as we know it, and more like an ant poem or other mnemonic representation?
Yeah, I always thought it amazing that crows could keep track of items up to five. Maybe we read that one wrong if ants are capable of counting so high, or maybe they're not exactly counting. I'd love to know more.
I'm pretty sure the ants are using a memory palace (method of loci).
It's simple, they just remember all their siblings born after them, until they arrive at their food. So once they reach Jant they know the food is close. Simply count backwards until they reach Trant and they're home.
Quorum sensing does not require a conceptual framework of numbers. The conceptual framework is the harder part, your brain and many cells perform quorumsensing and computations all the time that you would find difficult to do by hand, or to do symbolically.