Multiple stored views and landmark guidance in ants

S. P. D. Judd and T. S. Collett
Additional contact information
S. P. D. Judd: Sussex Centre for Neuroscience, School of Biological Sciences
T. S. Collett: Sussex Centre for Neuroscience, School of Biological Sciences

Nature, 1998, vol. 392, issue 6677, 710-714

Abstract: Abstract Under some circumstances, Diptera and Hymenoptera learn visual shapes retinotopically, so that they only recognize the shape when it is viewed by the same region of retina that was exposed to it during learning1,2. One use of such retinotopically stored views is in guiding an insect's path to a familiar site3,4,5. Because the retinal image of an object changes with viewing distance and (sometimes) direction, a single stored view may be insufficient to guide an insect from start to goal. Little, however, is known about the number of views that insects store. Here we show that wood ants take several ‘snapshots’ of a familiar beacon from different vantage points. An ant leaving a newly discovered food source at the base of a landmark performs a tortuous walk back to its nest during which it periodically turns back and faces the landmark. The ant, on revisiting the familiar landmark, holds the edges of the landmark's image steady at several discrete positions on its retina. These preferred retinal positions tend to match the positions of landmark edges that the ant captured during its preceding ‘learning walks’.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/33681 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:392:y:1998:i:6677:d:10.1038_33681

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/33681

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().