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Tread near an ants’ nest and the ants will come pouring out to defend their
queen. But how do they mobilise so quickly? Richard Brown at Mississippi State
University and Robert Hickling of Sonometrics in Huntington Woods, Michigan,
think they communicate distress using a high-pitched scraping sound, but now
Flavio Roces and Jürgen Tautz of the University of Würzburg in Germany
say they’re wrong—because ants are deaf. In the Journal of the American
Acoustical Society (vol 109, p 3080) Roces and Tautz calculate that sensory
hairs on ants’ antennae are too stiff to detect sound coming from…