Today from Bedtime Math: Bugs on Stilts

For ants in the deserts of Tunisia, it isn't easy to find their way home. The sand looks the same in every direction. The ants can't follow or smell their tracks, because the wind keeps erasing them. So the ants use the sun for direction, but how do they know how far they walk? It turns out they use math: they count their steps. Scientists figured this out by making tiny stilts out of pig hair and strapping them onto the ants' legs. Then they watched the ants try to walk home (we have a nice drawing of this from Andi H-R., since the real photo is a little too creepy-crawly for bedtime). With the stilts the ants took bigger steps, so they walked way past their anthill! So we just have to ask two things: how did the scientists strap on those stilts, and can ants do Bedtime Math?

Now here's some ant-sized math!

Wee ones: If you're counting your 10 steps from the kitchen to your room, what numbers do you say?

Little kids: How many more legs does an ant have than you? Bonus: If you have a pair of ants and you put a tiny stilt on every leg, how many stilts do you need to make?

Big kids: If you can trim 6,000 hairs off 1 pig, for how many ants can you make stilts? Bonus: If an ant thinks it's walking 52 miles to get home, but the stilts make it walk twice that distance, by how many miles does the ant overshoot its home?

Answers:

Wee ones: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

Little kids: 4 legs more...that's 6 for the ant vs. 2 for you. Bonus: 12 stilts.

Big kids: 1,000 ants. Bonus: By 52 miles! It walks 104 instead of 52.