Dorsal landmark navigation in a Neotropical nocturnal bee

Chaib, Sandra; Dacke, Marie; Wcislo, William T.; Warrant, Eric J.

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2021.05.029

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 22 publications

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“…Although the orientation behaviour of honeybees can also be explained with an image matching strategy [10], it remains unclear whether their snapshot includes information from all landmarks, as demonstrated for ants [15,22], or whether they process local landmarks as single entities and the panorama serves as a contextual cue to trigger the retrieval of the appropriate landmark memory [23,24]. Irrespective of possible species-specific differences in visual place learning, it has been demonstrated that landmarks in the goal's vicinity are important as they provide more precise spatial information than distant landmarks [12,[25][26][27].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monarch butterflies memorize the spatial location of a food source

Konnerth,

Foster,

el Jundi

et al. 2023

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Spatial memory helps animals to navigate familiar environments. In insects, spatial memory has extensively been studied in central place foragers such as ants and bees. However, if butterflies memorize a spatial location remains unclear. Here, we conducted behavioural experiments to test whether monarch butterflies ( Danaus plexippus ) can remember and retrieve the spatial location of a food source. We placed several visually identical feeders in a flight cage, with only one feeder providing sucrose solution. Across multiple days, individual butterflies predominantly visited the rewarding feeder. Next, we displaced a salient landmark close to the feeders to test which visual cue the butterflies used to relocate the rewarding feeder. While occasional landmark displacements were ignored by the butterflies and did not affect their decisions, systematic displacement of both the landmark and the rewarding feeder demonstrated that the butterflies associated the salient landmark with the feeder's position. Altogether, we show that butterflies consolidate and retrieve spatial memory in the context of foraging.

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