An ant that does not path integrate, except when searching
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1
The Australian National University, Research School of Biology, Australia
Comparative studies of navigation in ants show that the degree to which ants are guided by landmark information and by path integration depends on the navigational information content of the habitat in which they operate.
We believe to have found an extreme case of an ant, the Banded Sugar Ant (Camponotus consobrinus), that does not appear follow their home vector when foraging in complex urban environments. Sugar ants typically begin their solitary foraging trips to Eucalyptus trees at dusk and return to the nest at dawn. We caught foragers at the base of their food tree around sunrise when they were about to begin their 15m return trip over flat ground to the nest. These ants thus are likely to possess the full vector information provided by their path integration system. We displaced ants to four release stations: half-way along their normal foraging corridor (familiar), 5 m lateral to their foraging corridor (local), about 25 m away in a landmark-rich location (distant) and over 5 km away in an open location with distant and uniform landmark panorama (remote). We filmed their initial paths up to 50 cm from the release point and tracked their subsequent paths for 15 min or to the nest with differential GPS.
We find that (1) at the familiar site, ants are immediately oriented in the tree-nest direction, with some initially moving back towards the tree, before turning sharply towards the nest; (2) at the local site, ants initially search and subsequently either head towards the tree or towards the nest; (3) at the distant site, ants immediately search, with no evidence of any directed movements in the home vector or nest direction; (4) we find the same result at the remote, landmark-poor release site. Sugar ants thus appear to rely exclusively on landmark information and do not recall a home vector when that information is absent. However during search, ants repeatedly return to the release location at the remote site, suggesting that they do have the ability to path integrate.
Acknowledgements
Supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence Scheme. We thank DSTO for the loan of Differential GPS.
Keywords:
Ant navigation,
path integration,
Landmark guidance,
search,
Camponotus consobrinus,
navigational mechanisms
Conference:
International Conference on Invertebrate Vision, Fjälkinge, Sweden, 1 Aug - 8 Aug, 2013.
Presentation Type:
Oral presentation preferred
Topic:
Navigation and orientation
Citation:
Zeil
J,
Middleton
EJ and
Narendra
A
(2019). An ant that does not path integrate, except when searching.
Front. Physiol.
Conference Abstract:
International Conference on Invertebrate Vision.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fphys.2013.25.00097
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Received:
28 Feb 2013;
Published Online:
09 Dec 2019.
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Correspondence:
Prof. Jochen Zeil, The Australian National University, Research School of Biology, Canberra, ACT0200, Australia, jochen.zeil@anu.edu.au