The robot was created by the researchers to simulate the one-to-one tutoring behavior of rock ants, which allows one ant who has found a new, superior home to educate another ant how to get there.
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The Power of Playing Dead
A study shows that pretending to be immobile sometimes for an hour or more helps larvae of insects called antlions outlast hungry predators.
An antlion larva, not actually dead.Credit.Nigel R. Franks
By Cara Giaimo
March 7, 2021
Antlion larvae are famously ferocious: They dig pits in the sand to catch unsuspecting prey, stab it with their sharp mandibles and digest it from the inside out.
But everything is relative. To their own predators, antlion larvae are simply little snacks. And a colony’s cunning traps, grouped together and quite visible in the sand, are like flashing “DRIVE-THRU” signs.
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Most animals fake death in order to escape from their predators, while some species of prey choose to remain motionless for a lengthy period of time. Charles Darwin documented a beetle that remained static for 23 minutes. Even so, the University of Bristol has recorded a single antlion larva feigning to be dead for an outstanding 61 minutes.
(Photo : Egor Kamelev)
Beast of Prey
Equally, the number of times that an individual can remain static is unpredictable and not only long. This means that it will be difficult for a predator to predict when a prospective prey item will make a movement, thereby attracting its attention and becoming a meal to feed on.
blickwinkel / Alamy
Playing dead might help prey animals stay alive because the tactic leaves predators vulnerable to having their attention diverted elsewhere.
Nigel R. Franks at the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues were running a study on how the beetle-like larvae of flying antlions (
Euroleon nostras) use grains of sand to build pitfall traps to catch food. They noticed that when they dropped the 12-millimetre-long larvae onto a microbalance to weigh them, the insects would freeze.
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Fascinated, Franks and his colleagues observed the behaviour repeatedly, noting that the insects would stay immobile on the microbalance for anywhere from a few seconds to more than an hour.