I immediately know why and its not about steps its about communication. How do the ants know how many steps to the food? its because other ants communicated it. Im 99% sure that is what the study was about. So there is a lot they are verifying. communication. mathematical concepts, how they parse distance. remember the foot is called that because it was sorta an average size of a foot. yard is basically a stride.

Or if they can even walk on stilts. I know if some aliens came down and attached stilts to my legs I would just lay down and die.

Nah, the way ants can find their way around has been a favorite question of mine, and I know there's been a ton of people over lifetimes that have had curiosity about how exactly they navigate the world.

This answer, that they do count steps, makes more questions though. How do they count? Is it some kind of chemical reaction? Is it memory, are they counting in a way that we would recognize at all? Like, they could be fancy versions of those click counters bouncers use to keep track of how many people are up in the club, just some kind of chemical or mechanical tracker. It could be other methods that I can't think of because I know jack spit about ant biology at that level.

Reaching the specific question from "how do ants navigate" to "are they counting steps" isn't a big gap. I'm kinda surprised it took much time to get there tbh. Not sure when this experiment was done, but it's way easier than detecting pheromone trails or whatever else has been done.