Affiliation:
1. Department of Zoology, University of Zürich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057 Zürich, Switzerland
Abstract
SUMMARY
Homing ants have been shown to associate directional information with familiar landmarks. The sight of these local cues might either directly guide the path of the ant or it might activate a landmark-based vector that points towards the goal position. In either case, the ants define their courses within allocentric systems of reference. Here, we show that desert ants, Cataglyphis fortis, forced to run along a devious path can use egocentric information as well. The ants were trained to deviate from their straight homebound course by a wide inconspicuous barrier that was placed between the feeding and nesting sites. At a distant test area, the ants were confronted with an identical barrier rotated through 45°. After passing the edge of the obstacle, the ants did not proceed in the trained direction, defined by the skylight compass, but rotated their courses to match the rotation of the barrier. Visual guidance could be excluded because, as soon as the ants turned around the end of the barrier, the visual cue it provided vanished from their field of view. Instead, the ants must have maintained a constant angle relative to their previous walking trajectory along the obstacle and, hence, must have determined their new vector course in an egocentric way.
Publisher
The Company of Biologists
Subject
Insect Science,Molecular Biology,Animal Science and Zoology,Aquatic Science,Physiology,Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Reference14 articles.
1. Batschelet, E. (1981). Circular Statistics in Biology. New York, London: Academic Press.
2. Collett, M., Collett, T. S., Bisch, S. and Wehner, R. (1998). Local and global vectors in desert ant navigation. Nature394, 269–272.
3. Collett, T. S., Collett, M. and Wehner, R. (2001). The guidance of desert ants by extended landmarks. J. Exp. Biol.204, 1635–1639.
4. Collett, T. S., Fry, S. N. and Wehner, R. (1993). Sequence learning in honeybees. J. Comp. Physiol. A172, 693–706.
5. Gallistel, C. R. (1990). The Organization of Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cited by
20 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献