{"id":1880,"date":"2019-05-08T20:56:19","date_gmt":"2019-05-08T10:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cognav.net\/?p=1880"},"modified":"2019-05-08T20:56:19","modified_gmt":"2019-05-08T10:56:19","slug":"how-ants-navigate-within-their-dark-nest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/?p=1880","title":{"rendered":"How ants navigate within their dark nest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Heyman, Y., Vilk, Y., &amp; Feinerman, O. (2019). <span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S2589004219301002\"><strong>Ants use multiple spatial memories and chemical pointers to navigate their nest<\/strong><\/a><\/span>. iScience.<\/p>\n<p>Highlights<br \/>\n\u2022 Heyman et al. combine multiple technologies to study<strong><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"> how ants navigate within their dark nest<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u2022 <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>Ants substitute visual cues with gravity, chemical cues, and multi-target memories<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u2022 <strong><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">Following a catastrophe, ants quickly readjust the relative importance of cues<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/ars.els-cdn.com\/content\/image\/1-s2.0-S2589004219301002-fx1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter \" src=\"https:\/\/ars.els-cdn.com\/content\/image\/1-s2.0-S2589004219301002-fx1.jpg\" width=\"477\" height=\"477\" \/><\/a>Fig. source:\u00a0Heyman, Y. et al. 2019<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Summary<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Animal navigation relies on the available environmental cues and, where present, visual cues typically dominate. While much is known about vision-assisted navigation, knowledge of navigation in the dark is scarce.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Here, Heyman et al. combine <strong><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">individual tracking, dynamic modular nest structures, and spatially resolved chemical profiling to study how Camponotus fellah ants navigate within the dark labyrinth of their nest.<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">They find that, contrary to ant navigation above ground, <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>underground navigation cannot rely on long-range information<\/strong><\/span>. This limitation emphasizes the ants&#8217; capabilities associated with other navigational strategies.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Indeed, apart from gravity, <strong><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">underground navigation relies on self-referenced memories of multiple locations and on socially generated chemical cues placed at decision points away from the target<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Moreover, <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>the ants quickly readjust the weights attributed to these information sources in response to environmental changes.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Generally, studying well-known behaviors in a variety of environmental contexts holds the potential of revealing new insights into animal cognition.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>For further info, please read the paper\u00a0Heyman, Y. et al. 2019.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Heyman, Y., Vilk, Y., &amp; Feinerman, O. (2019). <span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S2589004219301002\"><strong>Ants use multiple spatial memories and chemical pointers to navigate their nest<\/strong><\/a><\/span>. iScience.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Heyman, Y., Vilk, Y., &amp; Feinerman, O. (2019). Ants use multiple spatial memories and chemical pointers to navigate their nest. iScience. Highlights \u2022 Heyman et al. combine multiple technologies to study how ants navigate within their dark nest \u2022 Ants substitute visual cues with gravity, chemical cues, and multi-target memories \u2022 Following a catastrophe, ants [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,468,346],"tags":[475,433,476,474],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1880"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1881,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880\/revisions\/1881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/braininspirednavigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}