Space Ants at the International Space Station

Ants taken up the ISS do quite well in space.

The formal experiment was a test of whether the ants could coordinate to search their environment, as they do on Earth.

At the start, they were housed in a small corner of their plastic box, but over the course of a few minutes, astronauts removed barriers from it, allowing them to access new territory.

Even though microgravity caused these ants (sent up to the International Space Station as part of an experiment) to frequently slip off the surface of their plastic boxes, they were usually able to grab back on after three to eight seconds of floating (you can see this happening to one ant in the top right):