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Egocentric and geocentric navigation during extremely long foraging paths of desert ants

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Abstract

Desert ants, Cataglyphis fortis, navigate individually in the salt pans of Tunisia by means of path integration. However, as path integration is error-prone, the ants in addition use visual and olfactory cues to pinpoint their nest entrance. It has been shown that the accuracy of the path integrator as well as the ants’ confidence in that egocentric navigational tool decreases with increasing foraging distance. Here, we show that despite the accumulating errors, even after far-reaching foraging runs path integration provides the ants with surprisingly accurate information regarding the nest position. However, in addition, the ants take into account distant visual cues that are most probably provided by the patterns along the horizon line behind the nest entrance.

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Acknowledgments

This study is dedicated to Ruediger Wehner, without whom we never would have got in contact with the fascinating desert ant Catagylphis. The study was financed by the Max Planck Society. We thank Katharina Franke for assistance during the field experiments and Alexander Warmbold and Dieter Kaiser for help with the computational analyses and the MATLAB programming.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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The international, national, and/or institutional guidelines for the care and use of animals have been followed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Hans Knoell Strasse 8, 07745, Jena, Germany

    Roman Huber & Markus Knaden

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  1. Roman Huber
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  2. Markus Knaden
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Correspondence to Markus Knaden.

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Huber, R., Knaden, M. Egocentric and geocentric navigation during extremely long foraging paths of desert ants. J Comp Physiol A 201, 609–616 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-015-0998-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-015-0998-3

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