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Multiple sources of celestial compass information in the Central Australian desert ant Melophorus bagoti

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Abstract

The Central Australian desert ant Melophorus bagoti is known to use celestial cues for compass orientation. We manipulated the available celestial cues for compass orientation for ants that had arrived at a feeder, were captured and then released at a distant test site that had no useful terrestrial panoramic cues. When tested in an enclosed transparent box that blocked some or most of the ultraviolet light, the ants were still well oriented homewards. The ants were again significantly oriented homewards when most of the ultraviolet light as well as the sun was blocked, or when the box was covered with tracing paper that eliminated the pattern of polarised light, although in the latter case, their headings were more scattered than in control (full-cue) conditions. When the position of the sun was reflected 180° by a mirror, the ants headed off in an intermediate direction between the dictates of the sun and the dictates of unrotated cues. We conclude that M. bagoti uses all available celestial compass cues, including the pattern of polarised light, the position of the sun, and spectral and intensity gradients. They average multiple cues in a weighted fashion when these cues conflict.

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Acknowledgments

We thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, Martin Whiting for providing us photospectrometric measurements, the Centre for Appropriate Technology for letting us work on their grounds and for providing storage space, and the CSIRO at Alice Springs for letting us rent a house and providing some administrative help. Funding for the work came from the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project Grant DP110100608) and from Macquarie University (postgraduate awards to AW, SS, PS).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia

    Antoine Wystrach, Sebastian Schwarz, Patrick Schultheiss, Alice Baniel & Ken Cheng

  2. School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RH, UK

    Antoine Wystrach

  3. Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, L8S 4K1, Canada

    Sebastian Schwarz

Authors
  1. Antoine Wystrach
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  2. Sebastian Schwarz
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  3. Patrick Schultheiss
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  4. Alice Baniel
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  5. Ken Cheng
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ken Cheng.

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359_2014_899_MOESM1_ESM.doc

Supplemental Fig. 1. The distribution of ants’ headings in the high UV-blocking box (left) and in the high UV-blocking box with a portion of the sky not containing the sun mirrored (right). The red arrows show the mean vector, with the rim of the circles indicating a vector length of 1. The centre of the small open circles indicate the 95 % confidence intervals about the mean direction. The black triangle indicates the feeder-nest direction. The numbers outside the histograms indicate the number of ants represented by a bar reaching the rim of the circle. The numbers inside the histograms (n’s) indicate the number of ants tested in each condition (DOC 32 kb)

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Wystrach, A., Schwarz, S., Schultheiss, P. et al. Multiple sources of celestial compass information in the Central Australian desert ant Melophorus bagoti . J Comp Physiol A 200, 591–601 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-014-0899-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-014-0899-x

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