Ant odometry in the third dimension

Sandra Wohlgemuth, Bernhard Ronacher () and Rüdiger Wehner
Additional contact information
Sandra Wohlgemuth: Institute of Biology, Humboldt-University Berlin
Bernhard Ronacher: Institute of Biology, Humboldt-University Berlin
Rüdiger Wehner: University of Zurich

Nature, 2001, vol. 411, issue 6839, 795-798

Abstract: Abstract Desert ants (Cataglyphis) are renowned for their ability to perform large-scale foraging excursions and then return to the nest by path integration. They do so by integrating courses steered and the distances travelled into a continually updated home vector1. Whereas the angular orientation is based on skylight cues2, how the ants gauge the distances travelled has remained largely unclear3,4. Furthermore, almost all studies on path integration in Cataglyphis5,6, as well as in spiders7,8, rodents9, and humans10,11, have aimed at understanding how the animals compute homebound courses in the horizontal plane. Here, we investigate for the first time how an animal's odometer operates when a path integration task has to be accomplished that includes a vertical component. We trained Cataglyphis ants within arrays of uphill and downhill channels, and later tested them on flat terrain, or vice versa. In all these cases, the ants indicated homing distances that corresponded not to the distances actually travelled but to the ground distances; that is, to the sum of the horizontal projections of the uphill and downhill segments of the ants' paths.

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35081069 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:411:y:2001:i:6839:d:10.1038_35081069

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

DOI: 10.1038/35081069

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 ().