PhD student Edmund Hunt and colleagues studied how Temnothorax albipennis ants explore nest cavities and negotiate through branching mazes. 
 
 They found that ants were significantly more likely to turn left than right when exploring new nests. Such left bias was also present when the ants were put in branching mazes, though this bias was initially obscured by wall-following behaviour. 
 
 So why do the majority of rock ants turn left when entering unknown spaces? 
 
 Edmund Hunt said: "The ants may be using their left eye to detect predators and their right to navigate. Also, their world is maze-like and consistently turning one way is a very good strategy to search and exit mazes. 
 
 "Furthermore, as their nest-mates are left-leaning too, there should also be safety in numbers. Consistent turning may also help the ants to monitor nest mates during house hunting. So perhaps leaning left is more shrewd than sinister." 
 
 Around ten percent of people are left-handed and brain lateralization is widespread in other vertebrates. There's also increasing evidence for sensory and motor asymmetries in the behaviour of invertebrates, but evidence for lateral biases in ants is relatively limited. 
 
 Behavioural lateralization in invertebrates is an important field of study because it may provide insights into the early origins of lateralization seen in a diversity of organisms, the researchers said. ||||| Around 90 percent of humans are naturally right-handed. It's an example of what researchers call behavioral lateralization, an innate bias we're born with. Animals also demonstrate behavioral lateralization: Birds, if given a choice to fly left or right at a fork in a tunnel, have individual preferences that they almost always stick to. Rats, too, have a preferred direction when they twitch their tail or turn their head, especially when they’re stressed out. 
 
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 Now, scientists have found that ants also demonstrate behavioral lateralization. When those insects are placed in mazes or new nests, researchers from the University of Bristol discovered that the ants almost always make left turns while exploring the unfamiliar setting. The team has no idea why the ants would have evolved to favor left rather than right, but they do have a few hypotheses. Consistently turning one direction over the other is a surer way of finding an exit if you’re lost or stuck somewhere. Or it could be that ants are all programmed to make left turns just to keep workers together. Or, the team added in a statement, “The ants may be using their left eye to detect predators and their right to navigate.” 
 
 While the team’s initial findings require more investigation, they point out that those follow-up studies could shed light on more than just a quirk of ant antics. Investigating the biological basis of behavioral lateralization in insects could offer insight into more complex creatures that exhibit similar behaviors, including humans.
– Roughly nine in 10 humans are right-handed, an example of "brain lateralization" that's pretty common among vertebrates—and now apparently invertebrates. Researchers in the UK are finding that even ants—which are invertebrates, meaning they have exoskeletons—carry an innate directional bias, in their case almost always turning left when exploring new territory, reports Science Daily. "The ants may be using their left eye to detect predators and their right to navigate," says a researcher. "Also, their world is maze-like, and consistently turning one way is a very good strategy to search and exit mazes." And since everybody is turning the same way, the researcher says there's also "safety in numbers. Perhaps leaning left is more shrewd than sinister." Either way, better understanding these tendencies in invertebrates could help shed light on the behavior in more complex creatures—even including humans, reports Smithsonian. (Check out this ant's secret weapon.)