A champion of organismal biology.

Abstract

2013). He has been invited to give a good number of named lectures across Europe, in the USA, and in India. And he has won his share of scientific prizes. These include the Karl Ritter von Frisch Medal from Germany (1994), the Marcel Benoist Prize from Switzerland (2002), and the King Faisal International Prize for Science from Saudi Arabia (2008). Among his many students over the years, 12 have attained full professorship, while one heads research at Novartis Pharmaceuticals, and one directs the Hansekolleg (Institute of Advanced Study in northern Germany). Rudiger Wehner has of course contributed much to the study of insect orientation and navigation. Our understanding of the polarisation compass, other compasses, path integration, the concept of matched filter (Wehner 1987), the use of landmarks by insects, and searching behaviour in ants have all benefitted from his contributions. We again need not give any more details here, as the first paper in this issue, by Cheng and Freas (2015), discuss this scientific legacy. Next comes another review on a topic that Rudiger Wehner has studied a lot: path integration. Mandyam Srinivasan, who has collaborated with Wehner on seminal work on the topic (Wehner and Srinivasan 1981, 2003), reviews path integration in bees and ants (Srinivasan 2015), two groups of animals that Wehner has studied. The directional component of path integration (a compass), the distance component (odometry), as well the integration component (putting direction and distance together to come up with a vector) are all discussed. In another review, on honeybees and their use of landmark information, Randolf Menzel and Uwe Greggers present what they suggest is cognitive mapping in bees (Menzel and Greggers 2015). The process is taken to work on travels over longer distances, other orienting mechanisms such as view matching playing a role closer to the goal. This special issue on Insect orientation and navigation honours the life and work of Rudiger Wehner, a frequent contributor to this journal and a champion of organismal biology. The occasion prompting this initiative was his 75th birthday, celebrated with his wife Sibylle Wehner in Sydney, Australia, in February while he was visiting one of us (KC) to collaborate on writing a paper and planning research on a new grant. A one-day symposium on Ecology, sensory processes, and cognition was also held in his honour at Macquarie University during that visit. Rudiger Wehner obtained his Ph.D. in 1967 under the supervision of Martin Lindauer at the University of Frankfurt, where one of his fellow students was Randolf Menzel. He became an assistant at the University of Zurich in 1967, before becoming Assistant Professor in 1970, and Full Professor in 1974. He has remained in Zurich ever since, with a long stint of dedicated service as the Head of the Zoologisches Institut (Department of Zoology). After becoming Professor Emeritus, he obtained a von Humboldt Award to collaborate with Wolfgang Rossler at the University of Wurzburg, a post that he has half-jokingly characterised as a post-professorial fellowship. To date, the collaboration is continuing on a series of research grants. He has had many collaborators over the years, including both of us guest editors, who owe chunks of our research career to our collaborations with him. We need not give details of his professional career, as Rudiger Wehner himself has done that recently (Wehner