Varieties of visual navigation in insects

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.

I2Bot: an open-source tool for multi-modal and embodied simulation of insect navigation

“…Vision serves as one of the primary means for animals to perceive their environment, and insects rely on visual cues for navigation in various ways (45,46). In this section, we present scenarios involving monocular, binocular, and widely used panoramic vision to demonstrate vision-motor control in the simulated ant robot.…”

Directed retreat and navigational mechanisms in trail following Formica obscuripes

“…Extensive research by Ken Cheng and colleagues on navigation in ants has highlighted the value of a comparative ecological approach in which mechanisms are studied in the context of their function in the natural environment (e.g., Bühlmann et al, 2011 , 2020 ; Cheng et al, 2009 , 2012 , 2014 ; Cheng, 2022 , 2023 ; Freas & Cheng, 2022 ; Freas et al, 2018 , 2019a , b , c ; Schultheiss et al, 2016 ). Comparisons between ant species have revealed many similarities that exist across a wide range of environments and foraging ecologies, with the presence of a common underlying navigational toolkit of concurrently operating strategies (Bühlmann et al, 2011 ; Cheng et al, 2009 ; Freas & Spetch, 2023 ; Wehner, 2020 ). Of these, the most frequently observed across ant species consists of an updating vector maintained by the path integration system reliant on a celestial compass (Collett & Collett, 2000 ; Wehner et al, 1996 ; Wehner, 2020 ).…”

Moonlight Polarisation Pattern Guides Nocturnal Bull Ants Home

“…Hence when the sun/moon is near the horizon, the pattern of polarised skylight is particularly simple with uniform direction of polarisation approximately parallel to the north-south axes (Dacke et al, 1999, 2003; Reid et al 2011; Zeil et al, 2014). The pattern’s stability makes the sky’s polarisation a useful directional cue for orientation (Wehner and Müller 2006; Reid et al 2011; Lebhardt and Ronacher 2013; Warrant and Dacke 2016; Freas et al 2017a, 2019; Freas and Spetch 2023), which insects detect through specialised photoreceptors located in the dorsal rim area of their eyes (Labhart and Meyer 1999; Homberg and Paech 2002; el Jundi et al 2015). Like solar polarisation, though a million times weaker, the moon reflects sunlight, producing a polarised moonlight pattern emanating from the moon’s position in the night sky (Gál et al 2001).…”