Animals show exceptional resilience in the face of sensory deficiencies, a capacity that is still largely misunderstood.
In a study published in PNAS, scientists reveal how desert ants compensate for visual loss through a rapid relearning process. These findings could inspire technological advancements to improve the resilience of artificial or biological systems.
Illustration image from Pixabay
Animals distinguish themselves from machines through their incredible resilience: the ability to overcome injuries, sensory deficiencies, or other disabilities to continue functioning. However, the mechanisms that make this resilience possible remain largely mysterious.
In humans, for example, when a person becomes blind, they must go through a long rehabilitation phase to relearn how to interact with their environment before regaining autonomous functioning. But what about animals? Can they quickly compensate for a deficiency and, if so, how do they achieve this?
Ants exhibit impressive sensory adaptation capabilities
In a study published in the journal PNAS, scientists explored this question in ants, these small insects often underestimated for their behavioral complexity. They wanted to know if, when faced with a sensory anomaly, ants were capable of overcoming this difficulty and resuming normal activity.
To do this, they temporarily "blinded one eye" of ants trained to recognize a route in their natural environment. The goal was to compare their reactions to those predicted by established scientific models.
Unsurprisingly, the partially blinded ants initially showed strong disorientation. Unable to recognize their environment as they did before, they could no longer find their way or retrace their usual routes. However, and astonishingly, they adapted in record time.
In just a few hours, these ants regained functional behavior. This result far exceeds the capacities predicted by current models, which lack the necessary compensation processes.
Rigidity and flexibility: a balance
But how did these ants manage to compensate so quickly? By analyzing their behavior, scientists discovered that they adopted a remarkable strategy: they "started from scratch."
Concretely, they spontaneously reverted to an early behavioral stage, as if they were relearning their environment with their new sensory condition. This adaptation process reveals an unsuspected behavioral plasticity, a learning and reorganization capacity much faster than what is observed in humans or what the most advanced machines could achieve.
These experiments shed light on unexpected aspects of how ants perceive the world. For example, an ant that learned a visual scene with one eye is unable to recognize it when using both eyes. This rigidity in their sensory processing contrasts with their behavioral flexibility and raises fundamental questions about how these insects encode and use visual information.
These results offer a new perspective on the mechanisms of sensory and behavioral resilience, with implications for various fields such as adaptive robotics and rehabilitation medicine. This natural ability of ants to quickly compensate for deficits could inspire technological or therapeutic advancements to improve the resilience of artificial and biological systems.