Path integration: how details of the honeybee waggle dance and the foraging strategies of desert ants might help in understanding its mechanisms.

Thomas S Collett

doi:10.1242/jeb.205187

Abstract

Path integration is a navigational strategy that gives an animal an estimate of its position relative to some starting point. For many decades, ingenious and probing behavioural experiments have been the only window onto the operation of path integration in arthropods. New methods have now made it possible to visualise the activity of neural circuits in Drosophila while they fly or walk in virtual reality. Studies of this kind, as well as electrophysiological recordings from single neurons in the brains of other insects, are revealing details of the neural mechanisms that control an insect's direction of travel and other aspects of path integration. The aim here is first to review the major features of path integration in foraging desert ants and honeybees, the current champion path integrators of the insect world, and second consider how the elaborate behaviour of these insects might be accommodated within the framework of the newly understood neural circuits. The discussion focuses particularly on the ability of ants and honeybees to use a celestial compass to give direction in Earth-based coordinates, and of honeybees to use a landscape panorama to provide directional guidance for path integration. The possibility is raised that well-ordered behaviour might in some cases substitute for complex circuitry.

Highlights

Path integration (PI) is the process by which an animal, when moving away from a start point, often its nest, cumulatively sums its path, generating an internal vector that specifies the line from the animal’s current position back to the start point, circuitous the outward trip
PI state does not help an ant decide how to respond to a prominent visual feature that occurs twice at different distances along a route (Collett et al, 1992). These results indicate that PI and visual place or route learning do not combine to form a ‘cognitive map’, a point considered in more detail by Webb (2019)
If the mapping is not time compensated, one way to utilise fixed connections between corresponding compartments of the fan-shaped body (FB) and protocerebral bridge (PB) would be for an insect to turn to face the sun, or, on overcast days, the position of the sun in a time-stamped memorised view of the panorama. The possibility of such a behaviourally mediated shift register could be investigated in desert ants when they select the direction of their home vector after displacement from a food site. This account of arthropod PI has concentrated on desert ants and honeybees, relating behavioural studies to current knowledge of the operation of the mushroom body (MB) and CX of Drosophila and other insects

Summary

Introduction

Path integration (PI) is the process by which an animal, when moving away from a start point, often its nest, cumulatively sums its path, generating an internal vector that specifies the line from the animal’s current position back to the start point, circuitous the outward trip. It is remarkable that the waggle dance signals direction relative to the current position of the sun (Fig. 2A), honeybees familiar with a landscape can signal the correct compass direction when cloud cover prevents any input from celestial cues (Dyer, 1987; Towne and Moscrip, 2008).

Results

Conclusion