navigation
- Flying Drosophila melanogaster maintain arbitrary but stable headings relative to the angle of polarized light
Summary: Relative to celestial cues, fruit flies select unpredictable flight headings and maintain them with gradually increasing fidelity. This may be a general dispersal strategy for animals with no target destination.
- The interaction of path integration and terrestrial visual cues in navigating desert ants: what can we learn from path characteristics?
Summary: Large-scale path recordings combined with high-speed recordings at key locations suggest that path integration modulates speed along the homing path in desert ants.
- Homing pigeons (Columba livia) modulate wingbeat characteristics as a function of route familiarity
Highlighted Article: Onboard accelerometry reveals that pigeons' flight characteristics undergo gradual changes over the course of learning a route, and thus provide potential biomechanical signatures of birds' landscape familiarity.
- Honeybees use the skyline in orientation
Summary: Honeybees can orient using the skyline, the panoramic silhouette of terrestrial objects against the sky, an ability probably important to bees in their everyday navigation.
- The Ol1mpiad: concordance of behavioural faculties of stage 1 and stage 3 Drosophila larvae
Summary: A community-based survey of the behavioural faculties of stage 1 Drosophila larvae, providing a resource for relating these behavioural faculties to the upcoming connectome of their nervous system.
- Propulsion in hexapod locomotion: how do desert ants traverse slopes?
Summary: Analysis of the alternating tripod gait of desert ants together with ground reaction forces and weight-specific leg impulses during inclined locomotion reveals the mechanical function of the hind legs as the main brake on downslopes (–60 and –30 deg) and the front legs as the main motor on steep upslopes (+60 deg).
- Male bumblebees perform learning flights on leaving a flower but not when leaving their nest
Summary: Bumblebee males leave their nest directly, but they perform learning flights when they leave artificial flowers, during which they turn back and fixate the flowers.
- Importance of the antenniform legs, but not vision, for homing by the neotropical whip spider Paraphrynus laevifrons
Summary: Tropical amblypygids inhabit structurally complex habitats, yet navigate home in the dark after a night hunting prey; olfaction appears to be important for navigation.
- Ontogeny of learning walks and the acquisition of landmark information in desert ants, Cataglyphis fortis
Summary: When leaving their nest for the first time, Cataglyphis fortis ants perform a sequence of learning walks during which they learn the surrounding landmark panorama with increasing accuracy.
- Pigeon navigation: exposure to environmental odours prior to release is sufficient for homeward orientation, but not for homing
Summary: Environmental local odours perceived at the release site are sufficient for pigeons’ homeward orientation, but pigeons can successfully home only if they can rely on olfactory cues during flight beyond the release site.