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Visual scanning behaviours and their role in the navigation of the Australian desert ant Melophorus bagoti

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Abstract

Ants are excellent navigators, using a combination of innate strategies and learnt information to guide habitual routes. The mechanisms underlying this behaviour are little understood though one avenue of investigation is to explore how innate sensori-motor routines are used to accomplish route navigation. For instance, Australian desert ant foragers are occasionally observed to cease translation and rotate on the spot. Here, we investigate this behaviour using high-speed videography and computational analysis. We find that scanning behaviour is saccadic with pauses separated by fast rotations. Further, we have identified four situations where scanning is typically displayed: (1) by naïve ants on their first departure from the nest; (2) by experienced ants departing from the nest for their first foraging trip of the day; (3) by experienced ants when the familiar visual surround was experimentally modified, in which case frequency and duration of scans were proportional to the degree of modification; (4) when the information from visual cues is at odds with the direction indicated by the ant’s path integration system. Taken together, we see a general relationship between scanning behaviours and periods of uncertainty.

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Acknowledgments

The experiments detailed here comply with the ethical standards of the countries where they were undertaken and analysed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Antoine Wystrach & Ken Cheng

  2. Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Antoine Wystrach, Andrew Philippides & Paul Graham

  3. Centre de Recherche sur la Cognition Animale, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France

    Amandine Aurejac

Authors
  1. Antoine Wystrach
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  2. Andrew Philippides
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  3. Amandine Aurejac
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  4. Ken Cheng
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  5. Paul Graham
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Correspondence to Paul Graham.

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Wystrach, A., Philippides, A., Aurejac, A. et al. Visual scanning behaviours and their role in the navigation of the Australian desert ant Melophorus bagoti . J Comp Physiol A 200, 615–626 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-014-0900-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-014-0900-8

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