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Freas CA, Spetch ML. A special issue honoring Ken Cheng: navigating animal minds. Learn Behav 2024; 52:9-13. [PMID: 38231427 DOI: 10.3758/s13420-024-00624-5] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 01/02/2024] [Indexed: 01/18/2024]
Affiliation(s)
- Cody A Freas
- School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
| | - Marcia L Spetch
- Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
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2
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Freas CA, Spetch ML. Varieties of visual navigation in insects. Anim Cogn 2023; 26:319-342. [PMID: 36441435 PMCID: PMC9877076 DOI: 10.1007/s10071-022-01720-7] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/20/2022] [Revised: 11/10/2022] [Accepted: 11/15/2022] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
Abstract
The behaviours and cognitive mechanisms animals use to orient, navigate, and remember spatial locations exemplify how cognitive abilities have evolved to suit a number of different mobile lifestyles and habitats. While spatial cognition observed in vertebrates has been well characterised in recent decades, of no less interest are the great strides that have also been made in characterizing and understanding the behavioural and cognitive basis of orientation and navigation in invertebrate models and in particular insects. Insects are known to exhibit remarkable spatial cognitive abilities and are able to successfully migrate over long distances or pinpoint known locations relying on multiple navigational strategies similar to those found in vertebrate models-all while operating under the constraint of relatively limited neural architectures. Insect orientation and navigation systems are often tailored to each species' ecology, yet common mechanistic principles can be observed repeatedly. Of these, reliance on visual cues is observed across a wide number of insect groups. In this review, we characterise some of the behavioural strategies used by insects to solve navigational problems, including orientation over short-distances, migratory heading maintenance over long distances, and homing behaviours to known locations. We describe behavioural research using examples from a few well-studied insect species to illustrate how visual cues are used in navigation and how they interact with non-visual cues and strategies.
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Affiliation(s)
- Cody A. Freas
- Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB Canada ,School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW Australia
| | - Marcia L. Spetch
- Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB Canada
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3
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Gilad T, Dorfman A, Subach A, Libbrecht R, Foitzik S, Scharf I. Evidence for the effect of brief exposure to food, but not learning interference, on maze solving in desert ants. Integr Zool 2021; 17:704-714. [PMID: 34958517 DOI: 10.1111/1749-4877.12622] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
Abstract
Theories of forgetting highlight two active mechanisms through which animals forget prior knowledge by reciprocal disruption of memories. According to "proactive interference", information learned previously interferes with the acquisition of new information, whereas "retroactive interference" suggests that newly gathered information interferes with already existing information. Our goal was to examine the possible effect of both mechanisms in the desert ant Cataglyphis niger, which does not use pheromone recruitment, when learning spatial information while searching for food in a maze. Our experiment indicated that neither proactive nor retroactive interference took place in this system although this awaits confirmation with individual-level learning assays. Rather, the ants' persistence or readiness to search for food grew with successive runs in the maze. Elevated persistence led to more ant workers arriving at the food when retested a day later, even if the maze was shifted between runs. We support this finding in a second experiment, where ant workers reached the food reward at the maze end in higher numbers after encountering food in the maze entry compared to a treatment, in which food was present only at the maze end. This result suggests that spatial learning and search persistence are two parallel behavioral mechanisms, both assisting foraging ants. We suggest that their relative contribution should depend on habitat complexity. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tomer Gilad
- School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
| | - Arik Dorfman
- School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
| | - Aziz Subach
- School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
| | - Romain Libbrecht
- Institute of Organismic and Molecular Evolution, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz, Germany
| | - Susanne Foitzik
- Institute of Organismic and Molecular Evolution, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz, Germany
| | - Inon Scharf
- School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
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4
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Sky and Ground Segmentation in the Navigation Visions of the Planetary Rovers. SENSORS 2021; 21:s21216996. [PMID: 34770302 PMCID: PMC8588092 DOI: 10.3390/s21216996] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/10/2021] [Revised: 10/15/2021] [Accepted: 10/18/2021] [Indexed: 11/16/2022]
Abstract
Sky and ground are two essential semantic components in computer vision, robotics, and remote sensing. The sky and ground segmentation has become increasingly popular. This research proposes a sky and ground segmentation framework for the rover navigation visions by adopting weak supervision and transfer learning technologies. A new sky and ground segmentation neural network (network in U-shaped network (NI-U-Net)) and a conservative annotation method have been proposed. The pre-trained process achieves the best results on a popular open benchmark (the Skyfinder dataset) by evaluating seven metrics compared to the state-of-the-art. These seven metrics achieve 99.232%, 99.211%, 99.221%, 99.104%, 0.0077, 0.0427, and 98.223% on accuracy, precision, recall, dice score (F1), misclassification rate (MCR), root mean squared error (RMSE), and intersection over union (IoU), respectively. The conservative annotation method achieves superior performance with limited manual intervention. The NI-U-Net can operate with 40 frames per second (FPS) to maintain the real-time property. The proposed framework successfully fills the gap between the laboratory results (with rich idea data) and the practical application (in the wild). The achievement can provide essential semantic information (sky and ground) for the rover navigation vision.
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Gallistel C. The physical basis of memory. Cognition 2021; 213:104533. [DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104533] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/31/2020] [Revised: 12/01/2020] [Accepted: 12/01/2020] [Indexed: 12/31/2022]
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Deeti S, Cheng K. Learning walks in an Australian desert ant, Melophorus bagoti. J Exp Biol 2021; 224:271960. [PMID: 34435625 PMCID: PMC8407660 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.242177] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/21/2020] [Accepted: 07/15/2021] [Indexed: 11/25/2022]
Abstract
The central Australian ant Melophorus bagoti is the most thermophilic ant in Australia and forages solitarily in the summer months during the hottest period of the day. For successful navigation, desert ants of many species are known to integrate a path and learn landmark cues around the nest. Ants perform a series of exploratory walks around the nest before their first foraging trip, during which they are presumed to learn about their landmark panorama. Here, we studied 15 naive M. bagoti ants transitioning from indoor work to foraging outside the nest. In 3–4 consecutive days, they performed 3–7 exploratory walks before heading off to forage. Naive ants increased the area of exploration around the nest and the duration of trips over successive learning walks. In their first foraging walk, the majority of the ants followed a direction explored on their last learning walk. During learning walks, the ants stopped and performed stereotypical orientation behaviours called pirouettes. They performed complete body rotations with stopping phases as well as small circular walks without stops known as voltes. After just one learning walk, these desert ants could head in the home direction from locations 2 m from the nest, although not from locations 4 m from the nest. These results suggest gradual learning of the visual landmark panorama around the foragers’ nest. Our observations show that M. bagoti exhibit similar characteristics in their learning walks to other desert ants of the genera Ocymyrmex and Cataglyphis. Summary: Before becoming foragers, Melophorus bagoti ants took 3–7 learning walks around their nest. They increased the duration and area explored over successive walks, stopping occasionally to scan the environment.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sudhakar Deeti
- Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia
| | - Ken Cheng
- Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia
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Freas CA, Congdon JV, Plowes NJR, Spetch ML. Same but different: Socially foraging ants backtrack like individually foraging ants but use different mechanisms. JOURNAL OF INSECT PHYSIOLOGY 2019; 118:103944. [PMID: 31520596 DOI: 10.1016/j.jinsphys.2019.103944] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/12/2019] [Revised: 08/07/2019] [Accepted: 09/10/2019] [Indexed: 06/10/2023]
Abstract
Diverse species may adopt behaviourally identical solutions to similar environmental challenges. However, the underlying mechanisms dictating these responses may be quite different and are often associated with the specific ecology or habitat of these species. Foraging desert ants use multiple strategies in order to successfully navigate. In individually foraging ants, these strategies are largely visually-based; this includes path integration and learned panorama cues, with systematic search and backtracking acting as backup mechanisms. Backtracking is believed to be controlled, at least in solitary foraging species, by three criteria: 1) foragers must have recent exposure to the nest panorama, 2) the path integrator must be near zero, and 3) the ant must be displaced to an unfamiliar location. Instead of searching for the nest, under these conditions, foragers head in the opposite compass direction of the one in which they were recently travelling. Here, we explore backtracking in the socially foraging desert harvester ant (Veromessor pergandei), which exhibits a foraging ecology consisting of a combination of social and individual cues in a column and fan structure. We find that backtracking in V. pergandei, similar to solitary foraging species, is dependent on celestial cues, and in particular on the sun's position. However, unlike solitary foraging species, backtracking in V. pergandei is not mediated by the same criteria. Instead the expression of this behaviour is dependent on the presence of the social cues of the column and the proportion of the column that foragers have completed prior to displacement.
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Affiliation(s)
- Cody A Freas
- Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Canada.
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8
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Chatterjee A, George EA, M V P, Basu P, Brockmann A. Honey bees flexibly use two navigational memories when updating dance distance information. ACTA ACUST UNITED AC 2019; 222:jeb.195099. [PMID: 31097604 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.195099] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/24/2018] [Accepted: 05/10/2019] [Indexed: 12/16/2022]
Abstract
Honey bees can communicate navigational information which makes them unique amongst all prominent insect navigators. Returning foragers recruit nest mates to a food source by communicating flight distance and direction using a small scale walking pattern: the waggle dance. It is still unclear how bees transpose flight information to generate corresponding dance information. In single feeder shift experiments, we monitored for the first time how individual bees update dance duration after a shift of feeder distance. Interestingly, the majority of bees (86%) needed two or more foraging trips to update dance duration. This finding demonstrates that transposing flight navigation information to dance information is not a reflexive behavior. Furthermore, many bees showed intermediate dance durations during the update process, indicating that honey bees highly likely use two memories: (i) a recently acquired navigation experience and (ii) a previously stored flight experience. Double-shift experiments, in which the feeder was moved forward and backward, created an experimental condition in which honey bee foragers did not update dance duration; suggesting the involvement of more complex memory processes. Our behavioral paradigm allows the dissociation of foraging and dance activity and opens the possibility of studying the molecular and neural processes underlying the waggle dance behavior.
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Affiliation(s)
- Arumoy Chatterjee
- National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore 560065, India.,School of Chemical & Biotechnology, SASTRA University, Thanjavur 613401, India
| | - Ebi A George
- National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore 560065, India
| | - Prabhudev M V
- National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore 560065, India.,Department of Biosciences, University of Mysore, Mysore 570006, India
| | - Pallab Basu
- International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore 560 089, India
| | - Axel Brockmann
- National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore 560065, India
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Abstract
Insect navigation is strikingly geometric. Many species use path integration to maintain an accurate estimate of their distance and direction (a vector) to their nest and can store the vector information for multiple salient locations in the world, such as food sources, in a common coordinate system. Insects can also use remembered views of the terrain around salient locations or along travelled routes to guide return, which is a fundamentally geometric process. Recent modelling of these abilities shows convergence on a small set of algorithms and assumptions that appear sufficient to account for a wide range of behavioural data. Notably, this 'base model' does not include any significant topological knowledge: the insect does not need to recover the information (implicit in their vector memory) about the relationships between salient places; nor to maintain any connectedness or ordering information between view memories; nor to form any associations between views and vectors. However, there remains some experimental evidence not fully explained by this base model that may point towards the existence of a more complex or integrated mental map in insects.
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Affiliation(s)
- Barbara Webb
- School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK
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10
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Terrestrial cue learning and retention during the outbound and inbound foraging trip in the desert ant, Cataglyphis velox. J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol 2019; 205:177-189. [DOI: 10.1007/s00359-019-01316-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/19/2018] [Revised: 12/21/2018] [Accepted: 01/16/2019] [Indexed: 10/27/2022]
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Freas CA, Cheng K. Panorama similarity and navigational knowledge in the nocturnal bull ant, Myrmicia midas. J Exp Biol 2019; 222:jeb.193201. [DOI: 10.1242/jeb.193201] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/28/2018] [Accepted: 05/09/2019] [Indexed: 11/20/2022]
Abstract
Nocturnal ants forage and navigate during periods of reduced light, making detection of visual cues difficult, yet they are skilled visual navigators. These foragers retain visual panoramic memories both around the nest and along known routes for later use, be it to return to previously visited food sites or to the nest. Here, we explore the navigational knowledge of the nocturnal bull ant, Myrmecia midas, by investigating differences in nest-ward homing after displacement of three forager groups based on similarities in the panoramas between the release site and previously visited locations. Foragers that travel straight up the foraging tree or to close trees around the nest show reduced navigational success in orienting and returning from displacements compared to individuals that forage further from the nest site. By analysing the cues present in the panorama, we show that multiple metrics of forager navigational performance correspond with the degree of similarity between the release site panorama and panoramas of previously visited sites. In highly cluttered environments, where panoramas change rapidly over short distances, the views acquired near the nest are only useful over a small area and memories acquired along foraging routes become critical.
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Affiliation(s)
- Cody A. Freas
- Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Canada
- Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
| | - Ken Cheng
- Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
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12
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Freas CA, Fleischmann PN, Cheng K. Experimental ethology of learning in desert ants: Becoming expert navigators. Behav Processes 2019; 158:181-191. [DOI: 10.1016/j.beproc.2018.12.001] [Citation(s) in RCA: 25] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/14/2018] [Revised: 11/03/2018] [Accepted: 12/01/2018] [Indexed: 12/31/2022]
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Freas CA, Schultheiss P. How to Navigate in Different Environments and Situations: Lessons From Ants. Front Psychol 2018; 9:841. [PMID: 29896147 PMCID: PMC5986876 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00841] [Citation(s) in RCA: 21] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/01/2018] [Accepted: 05/09/2018] [Indexed: 01/07/2023] Open
Abstract
Ants are a globally distributed insect family whose members have adapted to live in a wide range of different environments and ecological niches. Foraging ants everywhere face the recurring challenge of navigating to find food and to bring it back to the nest. More than a century of research has led to the identification of some key navigational strategies, such as compass navigation, path integration, and route following. Ants have been shown to rely on visual, olfactory, and idiothetic cues for navigational guidance. Here, we summarize recent behavioral work, focusing on how these cues are learned and stored as well as how different navigational cues are integrated, often between strategies and even across sensory modalities. Information can also be communicated between different navigational routines. In this way, a shared toolkit of fundamental navigational strategies can lead to substantial flexibility in behavioral outcomes. This allows individual ants to tune their behavioral repertoire to different tasks (e.g., foraging and homing), lifestyles (e.g., diurnal and nocturnal), or environments, depending on the availability and reliability of different guidance cues. We also review recent anatomical and physiological studies in ants and other insects that have started to reveal neural correlates for specific navigational strategies, and which may provide the beginnings of a truly mechanistic understanding of navigation behavior.
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Affiliation(s)
- Cody A Freas
- Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.,Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
| | - Patrick Schultheiss
- Research Center on Animal Cognition, Center for Integrative Biology, French National Center for Scientific Research, Toulouse University, Toulouse, France
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Abstract
Navigation is an essential skill for many animals, and understanding how animal use environmental information, particularly visual information, to navigate has a long history in both ethology and psychology. In birds, the dominant approach for investigating navigation at small-scales comes from comparative psychology, which emphasizes the cognitive representations underpinning spatial memory. The majority of this work is based in the laboratory and it is unclear whether this context itself affects the information that birds learn and use when they search for a location. Data from hummingbirds suggests that birds in the wild might use visual information in quite a different manner. To reconcile these differences, here we propose a new approach to avian navigation, inspired by the sensory-driven study of navigation in insects. Using methods devised for studying the navigation of insects, it is possible to quantify the visual information available to navigating birds, and then to determine how this information influences those birds' navigation decisions. Focusing on four areas that we consider characteristic of the insect navigation perspective, we discuss how this approach has shone light on the information insects use to navigate, and assess the prospects of taking a similar approach with birds. Although birds and insects differ in many ways, there is nothing in the insect-inspired approach of the kind we describe that means these methods need be restricted to insects. On the contrary, adopting such an approach could provide a fresh perspective on the well-studied question of how birds navigate through a variety of environments.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Susan D Healy
- School of Biology, University of St Andrews, Fife, UK
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Freas CA, Wystrach A, Narendra A, Cheng K. The View from the Trees: Nocturnal Bull Ants, Myrmecia midas, Use the Surrounding Panorama While Descending from Trees. Front Psychol 2018; 9:16. [PMID: 29422880 PMCID: PMC5788958 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00016] [Citation(s) in RCA: 24] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/10/2017] [Accepted: 01/08/2018] [Indexed: 01/09/2023] Open
Abstract
Solitary foraging ants commonly use visual cues from their environment for navigation. Foragers are known to store visual scenes from the surrounding panorama for later guidance to known resources and to return successfully back to the nest. Several ant species travel not only on the ground, but also climb trees to locate resources. The navigational information that guides animals back home during their descent, while their body is perpendicular to the ground, is largely unknown. Here, we investigate in a nocturnal ant, Myrmecia midas, whether foragers travelling down a tree use visual information to return home. These ants establish nests at the base of a tree on which they forage and in addition, they also forage on nearby trees. We collected foragers and placed them on the trunk of the nest tree or a foraging tree in multiple compass directions. Regardless of the displacement location, upon release ants immediately moved to the side of the trunk facing the nest during their descent. When ants were released on non-foraging trees near the nest, displaced foragers again travelled around the tree to the side facing the nest. All the displaced foragers reached the correct side of the tree well before reaching the ground. However, when the terrestrial cues around the tree were blocked, foragers were unable to orient correctly, suggesting that the surrounding panorama is critical to successful orientation on the tree. Through analysis of panoramic pictures, we show that views acquired at the base of the foraging tree nest can provide reliable nest-ward orientation up to 1.75 m above the ground. We discuss, how animals descending from trees compare their current scene to a memorised scene and report on the similarities in visually guided behaviour while navigating on the ground and descending from trees.
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Affiliation(s)
- Cody A. Freas
- Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | - Antione Wystrach
- Research Centre on Animal Cognition, Centre for Integrative Biology, CNRS, University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France
| | - Ajay Narendra
- Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | - Ken Cheng
- Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
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Lobecke A, Kern R, Egelhaaf M. Taking a goal-centred dynamic snapshot as a possibility for local homing in initially naïve bumblebees. ACTA ACUST UNITED AC 2018; 221:jeb.168674. [PMID: 29150448 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.168674] [Citation(s) in RCA: 11] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/21/2017] [Accepted: 11/13/2017] [Indexed: 11/20/2022]
Abstract
It is essential for central place foragers, such as bumblebees, to return reliably to their nest. Bumblebees, leaving their inconspicuous nest hole for the first time need to gather and learn sufficient information about their surroundings to allow them to return to their nest at the end of their trip, instead of just flying away to forage. Therefore, we assume an intrinsic learning programme that manifests itself in the flight structure immediately after leaving the nest for the first time. In this study, we recorded and analysed the first outbound flight of individually marked naïve bumblebees in an indoor environment. We found characteristic loop-like features in the flight pattern that appear to be necessary for the bees to acquire environmental information and might be relevant for finding the nest hole after a foraging trip. Despite common features in their spatio-temporal organisation, first departure flights from the nest are characterised by a high level of variability in their loop-like flight structure across animals. Changes in turn direction of body orientation, for example, are distributed evenly across the entire area used for the flights without any systematic relationship to the nest location. By considering the common flight motifs and this variability, we came to the hypothesis that a kind of dynamic snapshot is taken during the early phase of departure flights centred at the nest location. The quality of this snapshot is hypothesised to be 'tested' during the later phases of the departure flights concerning its usefulness for local homing.
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Affiliation(s)
- Anne Lobecke
- Department of Neurobiology and Cluster of Excellence 'Cognitive Interaction Technology' (CITEC), Bielefeld University, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany
| | - Roland Kern
- Department of Neurobiology and Cluster of Excellence 'Cognitive Interaction Technology' (CITEC), Bielefeld University, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany
| | - Martin Egelhaaf
- Department of Neurobiology and Cluster of Excellence 'Cognitive Interaction Technology' (CITEC), Bielefeld University, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany
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Saar M, Gilad T, Kilon-Kallner T, Rosenfeld A, Subach A, Scharf I. The interplay between maze complexity, colony size, learning and memory in ants while solving a maze: A test at the colony level. PLoS One 2017; 12:e0183753. [PMID: 28837675 PMCID: PMC5570381 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0183753] [Citation(s) in RCA: 15] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/18/2017] [Accepted: 08/10/2017] [Indexed: 11/18/2022] Open
Abstract
Central-place foragers need to explore their immediate habitat in order to reach food. We let colonies of the individually foraging desert ant Cataglyphis niger search for a food reward in a maze. We did so for three tests per day over two successive days and an additional test after a time interval of 4-20 days (seven tests in total). We examined whether the colonies reached the food reward faster, consumed more food and changed the number of workers searching over time, within and between days. Colonies' food-discovery time shortened within and between days, indicating that some workers learnt and became more efficient in moving through the maze. Such workers, however, also forgot and deteriorated in their food-discovery time, leveling off back to initial performance after about two weeks. We used mazes of increasing complexity levels, differing in the potential number of wrong turns. The number of workers searching increased with colony size. Food-discovery time also increased with colony size in complex mazes but not in simple ones, perhaps due to the more frequent interactions among workers in large colonies having to move through narrow routes. Finally, the motivation to solve the maze was probably not only the food reward, because food consumption did not change over time.
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Affiliation(s)
- Maya Saar
- School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
| | - Tomer Gilad
- School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
| | - Tal Kilon-Kallner
- School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
| | - Adar Rosenfeld
- School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
| | - Aziz Subach
- School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
| | - Inon Scharf
- School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
- * E-mail:
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