ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Bumblebees perceive the spatial layout of their environment in relation to their body size and form to minimize inflight collisions.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Effects of object motion on visual acuity in honeybees.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Encoding of movement primitives and body posture through distributed proprioception in walking and climbing insects.Biological cybernetics · 2026Article
- The modal-modular model of animal self-representation: a comparative and operational framework.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The exploration of consciousness in insects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Body Size Awareness and Modular Self-Representation in Reedfish (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Visual control of steering through multiple waypoints.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Visual physiology of Australian stingless bees.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2025Article
- Cats are (almost) liquid!-Cats selectively rely on body size awareness when negotiating short openings.iScience · 2024Article
- Wind gates olfaction-driven search states in free flight.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- Cleaner fish with mirror self-recognition capacity precisely realize their body size based on their mental image.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Evidence for socially influenced and potentially actively coordinated cooperation by bumblebees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Finding the gap: neuromorphic motion-vision in dense environments.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Ancient insect vision tuned for flight among rocks and plants underpins natural flower colour diversity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Body size awareness matters when dogs decide whether to detour an obstacle or opt for a shortcut.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Ants combine object affordance with latent learning to make efficient foraging decisions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- FlyDetector-Automated Monitoring Platform for the Visual-Motor Coordination of Honeybees in a Dynamic Obstacle Scene Using Digital Paradigm.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Optic flow based spatial vision in insects.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2023Review
- The potential underlying mechanisms during learning flights.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2023Review
- Close encounters of three kinds: impacts of leg, wing and body collisions on flight performance in carpenter bees.The Journal of experimental biology · 2023Article
- Going against the flow: bumblebees prefer to fly upwind and display more variable kinematics when flying downwind.The Journal of experimental biology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Animals that move through complex habitats must frequently contend with obstacles in their path. Humans and other highly cognitive vertebrates avoid collisions by perceiving the relationship between the layout of their surroundings and the properties of their own body profile and action capacity. It is unknown whether insects, which have much smaller brains, possess such abilities. We used bumblebees, which vary widely in body size and regularly forage in dense vegetation, to investigate whether flying insects consider their own size when interacting with their surroundings. Bumblebees trained to fly in a tunnel were sporadically presented with an obstructing wall containing a gap that varied in width. Bees successfully flew through narrow gaps, even those that were much smaller than their wingspans, by first performing lateral scanning (side-to-side flights) to visually assess the aperture. Bees then reoriented their in-flight posture (i.e., yaw or heading angle) while passing through, minimizing their projected frontal width and mitigating collisions; in extreme cases, bees flew entirely sideways through the gap. Both the time that bees spent scanning during their approach and the extent to which they reoriented themselves to pass through the gap were determined not by the absolute size of the gap, but by the size of the gap relative to each bee's own wingspan. Our findings suggest that, similar to humans and other vertebrates, flying bumblebees perceive the affordance of their surroundings relative their body size and form to navigate safely through complex environments.
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