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Landmarks or panoramas: what do navigating ants attend to for guidance?

BACKGROUND: Insects are known to rely on terrestrial landmarks for navigation. Landmarks are used to chart a route or pinpoint a goal. The distant panorama, however, is often thought not to guide navigation directly during a familiar journey, but to act as a contextual cue that primes the correct me...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Wystrach, Antoine, Beugnon, Guy, Cheng, Ken
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3177867/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21871114
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1742-9994-8-21
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author Wystrach, Antoine
Beugnon, Guy
Cheng, Ken
author_facet Wystrach, Antoine
Beugnon, Guy
Cheng, Ken
author_sort Wystrach, Antoine
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Insects are known to rely on terrestrial landmarks for navigation. Landmarks are used to chart a route or pinpoint a goal. The distant panorama, however, is often thought not to guide navigation directly during a familiar journey, but to act as a contextual cue that primes the correct memory of the landmarks. RESULTS: We provided Melophorus bagoti ants with a huge artificial landmark located right near the nest entrance to find out whether navigating ants focus on such a prominent visual landmark for homing guidance. When the landmark was displaced by small or large distances, ant routes were affected differently. Certain behaviours appeared inconsistent with the hypothesis that guidance was based on the landmark only. Instead, comparisons of panoramic images recorded on the field, encompassing both landmark and distal panorama, could explain most aspects of the ant behaviours. CONCLUSION: Ants navigating along a familiar route do not focus on obvious landmarks or filter out distal panoramic cues, but appear to be guided by cues covering a large area of their panoramic visual field, including both landmarks and distal panorama. Using panoramic views seems an appropriate strategy to cope with the complexity of natural scenes and the poor resolution of insects' eyes. The ability to isolate landmarks from the rest of a scene may be beyond the capacity of animals that do not possess a dedicated object-perception visual stream like primates.
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spelling pubmed-31778672011-09-22 Landmarks or panoramas: what do navigating ants attend to for guidance? Wystrach, Antoine Beugnon, Guy Cheng, Ken Front Zool Research BACKGROUND: Insects are known to rely on terrestrial landmarks for navigation. Landmarks are used to chart a route or pinpoint a goal. The distant panorama, however, is often thought not to guide navigation directly during a familiar journey, but to act as a contextual cue that primes the correct memory of the landmarks. RESULTS: We provided Melophorus bagoti ants with a huge artificial landmark located right near the nest entrance to find out whether navigating ants focus on such a prominent visual landmark for homing guidance. When the landmark was displaced by small or large distances, ant routes were affected differently. Certain behaviours appeared inconsistent with the hypothesis that guidance was based on the landmark only. Instead, comparisons of panoramic images recorded on the field, encompassing both landmark and distal panorama, could explain most aspects of the ant behaviours. CONCLUSION: Ants navigating along a familiar route do not focus on obvious landmarks or filter out distal panoramic cues, but appear to be guided by cues covering a large area of their panoramic visual field, including both landmarks and distal panorama. Using panoramic views seems an appropriate strategy to cope with the complexity of natural scenes and the poor resolution of insects' eyes. The ability to isolate landmarks from the rest of a scene may be beyond the capacity of animals that do not possess a dedicated object-perception visual stream like primates. BioMed Central 2011-08-27 /pmc/articles/PMC3177867/ /pubmed/21871114 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1742-9994-8-21 Text en Copyright ©2011 Wystrach et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research
Wystrach, Antoine
Beugnon, Guy
Cheng, Ken
Landmarks or panoramas: what do navigating ants attend to for guidance?
title Landmarks or panoramas: what do navigating ants attend to for guidance?
title_full Landmarks or panoramas: what do navigating ants attend to for guidance?
title_fullStr Landmarks or panoramas: what do navigating ants attend to for guidance?
title_full_unstemmed Landmarks or panoramas: what do navigating ants attend to for guidance?
title_short Landmarks or panoramas: what do navigating ants attend to for guidance?
title_sort landmarks or panoramas: what do navigating ants attend to for guidance?
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3177867/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21871114
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1742-9994-8-21
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