Trail using ants follow idiosyncratic routes in complex landscapes.
Idiosyncratic routes
Navigation
Pheromone trails
Visual navigation
Wood ants
Journal
Learning & behavior
ISSN: 1543-4508
Titre abrégé: Learn Behav
Pays: United States
ID NLM: 101155056
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
22 Nov 2023
22 Nov 2023
Historique:
accepted:
03
11
2023
medline:
23
11
2023
pubmed:
23
11
2023
entrez:
22
11
2023
Statut:
aheadofprint
Résumé
A large volume of research on individually navigating ants has shown how path integration and visually guided navigation form a major part of the ant navigation toolkit for many species and are sufficient mechanisms for successful navigation. One of the behavioural markers of the interaction of these mechanisms is that experienced foragers develop idiosyncratic routes that require that individual ants have personal and unique visual memories that they use to guide habitual routes between the nest and feeding sites. The majority of ants, however, inhabit complex cluttered environments and social pheromone trails are often part of the collective recruitment, organisation and navigation of these foragers. We do not know how individual navigation interacts with collective behaviour along shared trails in complex natural environments. We thus asked here if wood ants that forage through densely cluttered woodlands where they travel along shared trails repeatedly follow the same routes or if they choose a spread of paths within the shared trail. We recorded three long homing trajectories of 20 individual wood ants in their natural woodland habitat. We found that wood ants follow idiosyncratic routes when navigating along shared trails through highly complex visual landscapes. This shows that ants rely on individual memories for habitual route guidance even in cluttered environments when chemical trail information is available. We argue that visual cues are likely to be the dominant sensory modality for the idiosyncratic routes. These experiments shed new light on how ants, or insects in general, navigate through complex multimodal environments.
Identifiants
pubmed: 37993707
doi: 10.3758/s13420-023-00615-y
pii: 10.3758/s13420-023-00615-y
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Informations de copyright
© 2023. The Author(s).
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