This may well be true -- I clicked with enthusiasm because this would interest me a lot -- but if you follow the link you'll see that the married authors of the

This may well be true -- I clicked with enthusiasm because this would interest me a lot -- but if you follow the link you'll see that the married authors of the "study" have a history of making nonsense claims (she has two separate nonsense Wifi studies, which you'll see a bunch if you Google). The study itself was published in a pay-to-publish journal with no peer review. I read the paper. The design, as listed in the paper, seems fine. The main rival hypothesis for me would be that the ants do see the mirror, don't think it's themselves or pass the mirror test, and scratch because they're bothered by the marking on their face which they can feel. But the authors do claim to test this and find that ants not exposed to mirrors don't scratch their faces. So to be clear the threat I'm proposing to the study's validity is fraud on the part of the authors, not a failed execution.