ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2014
Looking and homing: how displaced ants decide where to go.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed, 87 citations in OpenAlex.
- How the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis uses its nest hill for homing.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Review
- Ant visual route navigation: How the fine details of behaviour promote successful route performance and convergence.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Vector-based navigation in desert ants: the significance of path-integration vectors.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2025Article
- Nest excavators' learning walks in the Australian desert ant Melophorus bagoti.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Varieties of visual navigation in insects.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Through Hawks' Eyes: Synthetically Reconstructing the Visual Field of a Bird in Flight.International journal of computer vision · 2023Article
- What view information is most important in the homeward navigation of an Australian bull ant, Myrmecia midas?Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2022Article
- Evidence of learning walks related to scorpion home burrow navigation.The Journal of experimental biology · 2022Article
- Oscillators and servomechanisms in orientation and navigation, and sometimes in cognition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Review
- NocturnaliScience · 2022Article
- Review
- A unified mechanism for innate and learned visual landmark guidance in the insect central complex.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Learning walks in an Australian desert ant, Melophorus bagoti.The Journal of experimental biology · 2021Article
- Minding the gap: learning and visual scanning behaviour in nocturnal bull ants.The Journal of experimental biology · 2021Article
- Active Inferants: An Active Inference Framework for Ant Colony Behavior.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- A dung beetle that path integrates without the use of landmarks.Animal cognition · 2020Article
- The effect of spatially restricted experience on extrapolating learned views in desert ants, Melophorus bagoti.Animal cognition · 2020Article
- The Antarium: A Reconstructed Visual Reality Device for Ant Navigation Research.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- The Cataglyphis Mahrèsienne: 50 years of Cataglyphis research at Mahrès.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2019Review
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We caught solitary foragers of the Australian Jack Jumper ant, Myrmecia croslandi, and released them in three compass directions at distances of 10 and 15 m from the nest at locations they have never been before. We recorded the head orientation and the movements of ants within a radius of 20 cm from the release point and, in some cases, tracked their subsequent paths with a differential GPS. We find that upon surfacing from their transport vials onto a release platform, most ants move into the home direction after looking around briefly. The ants use a systematic scanning procedure, consisting of saccadic head and body rotations that sweep gaze across the scene with an average angular velocity of 90° s(-1) and intermittent changes in turning direction. By mapping the ants' gaze directions onto the local panorama, we find that neither the ants' gaze nor their decisions to change turning direction are clearly associated with salient or significant features in the scene. Instead, the ants look most frequently in the home direction and start walking fast when doing so. Displaced ants can thus identify home direction with little translation, but exclusively through rotational scanning. We discuss the navigational information content of the ants' habitat and how the insects' behaviour informs us about how they may acquire and retrieve that information.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.