Yuri Gagaran made history in 1961 after he took the first trip ever into outer space. Now, ants from N.C. State are doing the same.

The ants traveled aboard the rocket—coincidentally named Antares—last Janu ary, making the International Space Station their new home. According to Clint Penick, a biological sciences postdoc toral research scholar, a total of 600 ants will be going to space—which Penick col lected.

The last time ants jour neyed to space they got blown to pieces after the space shut tle Discovery exploded.

The ants’ current space ad venture, though, occurred by chance, Penick said.

It all started in Spruce Pine, a small town north of Ashe ville, where Penick was gath ering pavement ants in order to study the urban heat island effect and climate change. According to Penick, the ants love to live under warm concrete, where they can in cubate their larvae.

After doing a few experi ments in his lab on campus, Penick said he received an email from Eleanor Rice, a temporary research techni cian, concerning NASA’s need for pavement ants.

As the season changed, finding pavement ants—the most common type of ant in the world—became dif ficult for NASA, according to Penick.

Penick followed up with the email and said he was glad to give the ants a “second life” now that he had finished his own experiments.

In fact, the ants had to struggle for their survival due to delays in the rocket launch, which was originally sched uled to occur before Christ mas, according to Penick.

“I got these panic emails from NASA saying things like, ‘We don’t know how to keep them alive,’” Penick said. Penick sent NASA a recipe for an egg omelet that would keep the ants alive.

The project, called Ants in Space, emphasizes the ef fects zero gravity has on the ants’ movement, according to Penick.

On Earth, ants first try to determine how crowded a particular space is by look ing at the rate in which they bump into other ants, accord ing to an interview by Ants in Space principal investiga tor Deborah Gordon on the project’s website. Fewer ants in a given area cause them to spread out in straight lines, whereas areas with a large amount of ants use twists and turns to cover a smaller por tion of the space, according to the website.

“Ants don’t just move around randomly like loose molecules. They exchange a little information,” Penick said.

However, the ants’ ordered system of navigation may fall to pieces in outer space, since microgravity can distort how ants meet each other, thereby giving them a false sense of density, Gordon said in the interview.

Another focus of the proj ect consists of educational outreach, Penick said. While video cameras record the ants in space, students and teach ers in K-12 schools across the United States will observe other pavement ants on Earth during similar experiments.

“What’s cool about this for schools in general is that the ants are common, don’t sting and are pretty friendly,” Penick said.

Teachers go out with stu dents to collect the ants, with some even building nests for the critters, according to Penick. Penick said re searchers are also interested in seeing how the ants react when they return to Earth.

For example, when they sent jumping spiders to space, the spiders forgot how to jump under regular grav ity conditions after returning to Earth, causing them to slip and fall, Penick said.

While Penick said he main ly studies how ants respond to climate change, he is also interested in how human be haviors affect ants. This in cludes the impact of how food waste affects ant nutrition, as well as how the social behav ior of ants can affect humans.

“The society of ants are very complex and we can use them as metaphors to understand humans, as well,” Penick said.