Path integration: how details of the honeybee waggle dance and the foraging strategies of desert ants might help in understanding its mechanisms

Abstract

ABSTRACT Path integration is a navigational strategy that gives an animal an estimate of its position relative to some starting point. For many decades, ingenious and probing behavioural experiments have been the only window onto the operation of path integration in arthropods. New methods have now made it possible to visualise the activity of neural circuits in Drosophila while they fly or walk in virtual reality. Studies of this kind, as well as electrophysiological recordings from single neurons in the brains of other insects, are revealing details of the neural mechanisms that control an insect's direction of travel and other aspects of path integration. The aim here is first to review the major features of path integration in foraging desert ants and honeybees, the current champion path integrators of the insect world, and second consider how the elaborate behaviour of these insects might be accommodated within the framework of the newly understood neural circuits. The discussion focuses particularly on the ability of ants and honeybees to use a celestial compass to give direction in Earth-based coordinates, and of honeybees to use a landscape panorama to provide directional guidance for path integration. The possibility is raised that well-ordered behaviour might in some cases substitute for complex circuitry.