@futurebird seeing her turn and climb my way, looking over my shoulder to see who she's coming towards and it's just me, looking back and pointing at my own chest like "really, me?"

This is so lovely to see, you did a marvelous job giving that ant personality. I really like how much "non-locomotive" leg action there is.

@SnoopJ

I swear to god they really do that. Their legs are chaos.

@futurebird they're just tappin around and keeping tabs on things, or doin a lil dance just cause

and I respect that

@futurebird come to think of it, this makes me wonder about their proprioception. my understanding is that it's pretty dang good but I don't know the subject with any depth, most of what I know about ants of late I learn from you! (and thanks for that!)

@futurebird and this in turn has led me to the marvelous sentence fragment:

«We mounted Cataglyphis velox ants in a virtual reality setup…»

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-53856-4

@futurebird is this what an aphid would see if it had eyes on its backend?

@futurebird You always hear that ants have a "tripod gait" where they step with legs 1,3,5, and then step with legs 2,4,6.

In doing these animations, have you gotten a sense for how rigidly do they stick to that ideal? Are they really locked into that gait? Or is it just their ideal running-on-a-flat-surface gallop?

@apLundell

I'm still getting an handle on working with so many legs for animations. But from observations of ants the tripod gait is noticeable when they are moving at a good clip in a line.

When moving more slowly, or working with their front limbs (which they use for digging, positioning soil and many other tasks) it's not that predictable.

They sort of just slap the back limbs down but the front two are much more controlled. This animation traced from a real ant shows it.