

Counting ants - madflame991
http://grahamshawcross.com/2014/07/26/counting-ants/

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tna
I find this research a bit suspicious:

1\. The authors do not provide a single complete video of the experiment, only
very short 5-15 seconds fragments.

2\. The papers lack detailed experimental procedures and protocol description
(compared to a typical paper from Nature on the same subject).

3\. The papers are published in seemingly unrelated journals, which may not
have the adequate know-how to do peer review of such experiments: Electronic
Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Information Theory Society
Newsletter, etc. If the behavior described is real, it is highly notable, I
would expect at least one paper published in Nature by the authors.

4\. The only videos available are short fragments, where 1 ant is seen
crossing a single (1) left/right branch. Why not film an entire ant path,
which according to paper should last about 100-200 seconds?

[https://www.youtube.com/user/reznikovazhanna/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/reznikovazhanna/videos)

I also checked both author's pages:
[http://boris.ryabko.net/papers.html](http://boris.ryabko.net/papers.html)
[http://reznikova.net/Publications.html](http://reznikova.net/Publications.html)

Is this specific counting and communication capability independently confirmed
by other research groups?

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slazaro
> This is not about how to count ants but how ants count.

I was disappointed to read this, I tried to figure out in my head how they
count ants in the world, and now I'm left with that void...

Edit: After having read the article, I'm not disappointed anymore, this was
really interesting!

~~~
raldi
How to count an ant population:

1\. Collect 25 ants

2\. Paint a dot on their abdomens

3\. Release them

4\. Wait

5\. Collect 25 ants again

6\. Count how many are marked with dots

7\. Divide 25² by this number

The result is a pretty good approximation of the size of the total ant
population. To increase precision and accuracy, replace all the "25"s above
with a larger number.

~~~
pavel_lishin
What's this method called?

~~~
Luc
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_and_recapture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_and_recapture)

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nerfhammer
nitpick: the article uses the male pronouns for the worker ants. All ants and
bees except for short-lived breeders are female.

