Backtracking behaviour in lost ants: an additional strategy in their navigational toolkit

Wystrach, Antoine; Schwarz, Sebastian; Baniel, Alice; Chen, Ken

doi:10.1098/rspb.2013.1677

Cited by 62 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…One aspect of this concerns the mechanism by which individuals decide to lay scent marks. Such decisions may involve the ant's general knowledge of the environment (Collett and Collett, 2002), her recent history (Wystrach et al, 2013), and her interaction with obstacles or passageways. The differences in scent mark laying behavior according to the large-scale structure of an obstacle, as presented in Figure 5D, suggest an experimental scheme for testing the interplay between these factors.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A locally-blazed ant trail achieves efficient collective navigation despite limited information

Fonio

Heyman

Boczkowski

et al. 2016

eLife

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Any organism faces sensory and cognitive limitations which may result in maladaptive decisions. Such limitations are prominent in the context of groups where the relevant information at the individual level may not coincide with collective requirements. Here, we study the navigational decisions exhibited by Paratrechina longicornis ants as they cooperatively transport a large food item. These decisions hinge on the perception of individuals which often restricts them from providing the group with reliable directional information. We find that, to achieve efficient navigation despite partial and even misleading information, these ants employ a locally-blazed trail. This trail significantly deviates from the classical notion of an ant trail: First, instead of systematically marking the full path, ants mark short segments originating at the load. Second, the carrying team constantly loses the guiding trail. We experimentally and theoretically show that the locally-blazed trail optimally and robustly exploits useful knowledge while avoiding the pitfalls of misleading information.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.20185.001

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A locally-blazed ant trail achieves efficient collective navigation despite limited information

Fonio

Heyman

Boczkowski

et al. 2016

eLife

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“…Additionally, constructing a global landscape from local landmarks is an important navigation strategy for both bees and ants [32,[59][60][61]. Interestingly, arbitrating between local and global processing of the visual panorama, among other available cues [62][63][64], has revealed a crucial factor of navigation success [32,60]. Global or local precedence depends indeed on the individual experience about which cues are more relevant in a given position [32,60].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The forest or the trees: preference for global over local image processing is reversed by prior experience in honeybees

et al. 2015

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Traditional models of insect vision have assumed that insects are only capable of low-level analysis of local cues and are incapable of global, holistic perception. However, recent studies on honeybee (Apis mellifera) vision have refuted this view by showing that this insect also processes complex visual information by using spatial configurations or relational rules. In the light of these findings, we asked whether bees prioritize global configurations or local cues by setting these two levels of image analysis in competition. We trained individual freeflying honeybees to discriminate hierarchical visual stimuli within a Y-maze and tested bees with novel stimuli in which local and/or global cues were manipulated. We demonstrate that even when local information is accessible, bees prefer global information, thus relying mainly on the object's spatial configuration rather than on elemental, local information. This preference can be reversed if bees are pre-trained to discriminate isolated local cues. In this case, bees prefer the hierarchical stimuli with the local elements previously primed even if they build an incorrect global configuration. Pre-training with local cues induces a generic attentional bias towards any local elements as local information is prioritized in the test, even if the local cues used in the test are different from the pre-trained ones. Our results thus underline the plasticity of visual processing in insects and provide new insights for the comparative analysis of visual recognition in humans and animals.

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“…This kind of process has been proposed in a number of recent models of insect navigation (Cruse & Wehner ; Collett ; Wystrach et al. 2013b).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A fourth distinct system of backtracking, however, has just been reported (Wystrach et al. 2013b). In path integration, the insect keeps track of the distance and direction from the starting point as it travels and then runs or flies off the calculated vector when it is time to home (Collett & Collett ; Wehner ; Wehner & Srinivasan ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual Matching in the Orientation of Desert Ants (Melophorus bagoti): The Effect of Changing Skyline Height

et al. 2014

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Ants are known to use the terrestrial visual panorama in navigation. Recent evidence has accumulated for the use of the currently perceived visual panorama to determine a direction to head in. The pattern of the height of the terrestrial surround, the skyline, is one key cue for the Central Australian red honey ant Melophorus bagoti in determining a direction of travel. But ants might also possess some mechanism to match the skyline heights encountered during training, which functions to steer away from regions whose skyline is too high and towards regions whose skyline is too low. We made an initial test of this hypothesis by training ants to visit a feeder centred between two experimentally constructed walls of black cloth. Trained ants were then tested for their initial homing direction with the walls retaining their heights as encountered in training (controls), with one of the walls lowered or raised in height, or with one wall lowered and the opposite wall raised. Wall‐height manipulations deflected the initial headings of ants towards the lower wall, with combined wall lowering and wall raising changing the initial headings by ~30° when compared with controls. The results suggest that the ants combined the dictates of the panorama in determining the best direction of travel (a heading towards the nest) with some attractor mechanism that functions to establish the skyline heights of training conditions (a heading towards the lower wall).

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Backtracking behaviour in lost ants: an additional strategy in their navigational toolkit

Cited by 62 publications

References 45 publications

A locally-blazed ant trail achieves efficient collective navigation despite limited information

A locally-blazed ant trail achieves efficient collective navigation despite limited information

The forest or the trees: preference for global over local image processing is reversed by prior experience in honeybees

Visual Matching in the Orientation of Desert Ants (Melophorus bagoti): The Effect of Changing Skyline Height

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