Abstract
Foraging ants are able to acquire and retain long-term memories of panorama cues around the nest and along known routes. Here we explore foragers’ ability to learn and retain skyline cues experienced on only the outbound or inbound portion of the foraging trip. Foragers exposed to the skyline on the outbound portion showed single trial learning of these cues. Furthermore, the navigational performance of these “Outbound-Only” foragers was on par with foragers that experienced the full route. In contrast, foragers experiencing the skyline only on the inbound portion, “Inbound-Only” foragers, took 5 trips to successfully learn these cues. These performance differences persisted for long-term memory retention. Outbound-Only foragers successfully oriented after a 3-day delay and showed similar performance to the full route control, whereas Inbound-Only foragers were no longer able to orient successfully to these cues after 3 days. Additionally, long-term memory formation of skyline cues appears to require multiple presentations, as foragers with only one outbound experience of the skyline could not successfully orient after the delay. Our results suggest that terrestrial cue learning and retention is more robust when cues are experienced on the outbound segment of the foraging trip.
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Discovery Grant (#04133). We would like to thank Antoine Wystrach and Sebastian Schwarz for their logistical support in the field and their help with methodology advice. An additional thank you to Sebastian Schwarz and Leo Clement for helping with clearing the nest site and erecting the arenas. A final thank you to Ken Cheng for his advice in tweaking the experiment at the conceptual stages.
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Experiments conceived and designed: CAF and MS. Collected and analysed data: CAF. Drafted and revised paper: CAF and MS.
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Freas, C.A., Spetch, M.L. Terrestrial cue learning and retention during the outbound and inbound foraging trip in the desert ant, Cataglyphis velox. J Comp Physiol A 205, 177–189 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-019-01316-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-019-01316-6