Overview
- Seungah Chung of Beverly Vista Middle School built a T‑shaped maze with 200 red harvester ants and tested their route learning, a story published across outlets on Aug. 5–6, 2026.
- After ants learned the route, Chung rearranged artificial landmarks such as fake leaves, rocks and colored blocks and many ants became disoriented or chose the wrong path despite the food staying in the same place.
- She ran trials by introducing ants in groups of about 15 and used a small piece of tangerine as a reward to let the insects repeatedly explore and learn the route.
- The project earned Chung national recognition as a 2025 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge finalist and has been highlighted in the media for demonstrating youth‑driven experimental science.
- The finding complements long research on ant navigation that emphasizes chemical trails and path integration, but the work was reported as a middle‑school project in an artificial maze and has not yet appeared in peer‑reviewed literature, so replication is needed before broader biological or robotic claims are confirmed.