Ortstreue in foraging ants of theFormica rufa group — Hierarchy of orienting cues and long-term memory

Rosengren, R.; Fortelius, W.

doi:10.1007/bf02224248

Cited by 105 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Zigzag paths are found in a variety of walking and flying insects either following pheromone trails or moving up odour plumes [34]. The paths of wood ants (F. rufa L.) often have a similar sinuous or zigzag shape (figure 1c,d) and are also guided both by olfactory cues [35] and by visual information [36][37][38][39]. How do the mechanisms of visual guidance in these ants operate so as to avoid disrupting the ants' zigzag path?…”

Section: Intermittent Visual Control and The Wood Ants' Zigzag Pathmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scene perception and the visual control of travel direction in navigating wood ants

Collett

Lent

Graham

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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This review reflects a few of Mike Land's many and varied contributions to visual science. In it, we show for wood ants, as Mike has done for a variety of animals, including readers of this piece, what can be learnt from a detailed analysis of an animal's visually guided eye, head or body movements. In the case of wood ants, close examination of their body movements, as they follow visually guided routes, is starting to reveal how they perceive and respond to their visual world and negotiate a path within it. We describe first some of the mechanisms that underlie the visual control of their paths, emphasizing that vision is not the ant's only sense. In the second part, we discuss how remembered local shape-dependent and global shape-independent features of a visual scene may interact in guiding the ant's path.

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Section: Intermittent Visual Control and The Wood Ants' Zigzag Pathmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scene perception and the visual control of travel direction in navigating wood ants

Collett

Lent

Graham

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…Eventually, this is superseded by a series of snapshot images acquired en route to the goal, with each image eliciting a specific behaviour that brings the individual to the next image and the beginning of the next segment (Collett and Cartwright, 1983;Judd and Collett, 1998;Graham and Collett, 2006). Such route memories can be very accurate in both bees (Menzel et al, 2011) and ants [% correct choices at a single bifurcation: >90% in Formica rufa (Rosengren and Fortelius, 1986), 95% in Formica lugubris (Fourcassie and Beugnon, 1988), 95% in Lasius niger and 97% in Lasius flavus (Jones et al, in preparation)]. …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similarly, pheromone trails might be of importance to experienced ants if the route to the food source is hard to learn. Whilst route learning in ants has often been reported to be both rapid and accurate (Fourcassie and Beugnon, 1988;Rosengren and Fortelius, 1986), most studies were conducted on simple trails with a single bifurcation. Trails with multiple choice points may provide a greater challenge, as more information must be stored, and route learning at one bifurcation may interfere with route learning at another.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ant foraging on complex trails: route learning and the role of trail pheromones inLasius niger

Czaczkes

Grüter

Ellis

et al. 2012

Journal of Experimental Biology

109

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SUMMARYAnts are central place foragers and use multiple information sources to navigate between the nest and feeding sites. Individual ants rapidly learn a route, and often prioritize memory over pheromone trails when tested on a simple trail with a single bifurcation. However, in nature, ants often forage at locations that are reached via more complex routes with multiple trail bifurcations. Such routes may be more difficult to learn, and thus ants would benefit from additional information. We hypothesized that trail pheromones play a more significant role in ant foraging on complex routes, either by assisting in navigation or route learning or both. We studied Lasius niger workers foraging on a doubly bifurcating trail with four end points. Route learning was slower and errors greater on alternating (e.g. left-right) versus repeating routes (e.g. left-left), with error rates of 32 and 3%, respectively. However, errors on alternating routes decreased by 30% when trail pheromone was present. Trail pheromones also aid route learning, leading to reduced errors in subsequent journeys without pheromone. If an experienced forager makes an error when returning to a food source, it reacts by increasing pheromone deposition on the return journey. In addition, high levels of trail pheromone suppress further pheromone deposition. This negative feedback mechanism may act to conserve pheromone or to regulate recruitment. Taken together, these results demonstrate further complexity and sophistication in the foraging system of ant colonies, especially in the role of trail pheromones and their relationship with learning and the use of private information (memory) in a complex environment.

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“…Cataglyphis bicolor (Santschi, 1913), Formica rufa (Rosengren and Fortelius, 1986), Cataglyphis fortis (Wehner et al, 1996), Melophorus bagoti (Kohler and Wehner, 2005). Experienced ants use visual landmarks to guide their routes and experiments show that portions of the route can be performed out of sequence and independently of path integration (Collett et al, 1992;Collett et al, 1998;Andel and Wehner, 2004;Kohler and Wehner, 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How might ants use panoramic views for route navigation?

Philippides

Baddeley

Chen

et al. 2011

Journal of Experimental Biology

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SUMMARYStudies of insect navigation have demonstrated that insects possess an interesting and sophisticated repertoire of visual navigation behaviours. Ongoing research seeks to help us understand how these behaviours are controlled in natural complex environments. A necessary complement to behavioural studies is an understanding of the sensory ecology within which an animal behaves. To this end we have analysed ants'-perspective views of a habitat within which desert ant navigation is well studied. Results from our analysis suggest that: parsimonious visual strategies for homing and route guidance are effective over behaviourally useful distances even in cluttered environments; that these strategies can function effectively using only the skyline heights as input; and that the simplicity and efficacy of using stored views as a visual compass makes it a viable and robust mechanism for route guidance.

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Ortstreue in foraging ants of theFormica rufa group — Hierarchy of orienting cues and long-term memory

Cited by 105 publications

References 31 publications

Scene perception and the visual control of travel direction in navigating wood ants

Scene perception and the visual control of travel direction in navigating wood ants

Ant foraging on complex trails: route learning and the role of trail pheromones inLasius niger

How might ants use panoramic views for route navigation?

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