Abstract
Desert ants, Cataglyphis fortis, perform large-scale foraging trips in their featureless habitat using path integration as their main navigation tool. To determine their walking direction they use primarily celestial cues, the sky’s polarization pattern and the sun position. To examine the relative importance of these two celestial cues, we performed cue conflict experiments. We manipulated the polarization pattern experienced by the ants during their outbound foraging excursions, reducing it to a single electric field (e-)vector direction with a linear polarization filter. The simultaneous view of the sun created situations in which the directional information of the sun and the polarization compass disagreed. The heading directions of the homebound runs recorded on a test field with full view of the natural sky demonstrate that none of both compasses completely dominated over the other. Rather the ants seemed to compute an intermediate homing direction to which both compass systems contributed roughly equally. Direct sunlight and polarized light are detected in different regions of the ant’s compound eye, suggesting two separate pathways for obtaining directional information. In the experimental paradigm applied here, these two pathways seem to feed into the path integrator with similar weights.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Julja Koch for her help with the set-up and Jorge Jaramillo for helpful comments. In particular, we are grateful to Rüdiger Wehner for many discussions and his continuous support. Helpful comments from two anonymous referees are also acknowledged. We want to express our gratitude to the Tunisian government for kindly allowing us to carry out these investigations in this beautiful country. Financial support was provided by grants from the DFG (Ro 547/10-1) and the Volkswagen Foundation (I/78 574) to B.R. The experiments comply with the “Principles of Animal Care” and with the current German law.
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.
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Lebhardt, F., Ronacher, B. Interactions of the polarization and the sun compass in path integration of desert ants. J Comp Physiol A 200, 711–720 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-013-0871-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-013-0871-1