Innate visual attraction before, during and after escape from adverse substrates in carpenter ants

Many animals exhibit an innate attraction to dark areas or objects, driving orientation behaviours such as beacon aiming. In ants, some species do not appear to display beacon aiming. Here, we show that in one such species, Camponotus japonicus, the behaviour is triggered when crossing liquid-covered surfaces, regardless of locomotor pattern and the presence of water in the liquid. Once initiated, beacon aiming persisted even after the ants transitioned from water to dry substrates, as evidenced by their reorientation towards a displaced beacon. Beacon aiming could be observed before the ants fully transitioned from a dry substrate to a liquid-covered surface: when the ants were isolated on a water-surrounded platform, attraction to a beacon emerged while they were contacting the water, before finally deciding to swim towards the beacon. Adverse substrate conditions in general appear to be a factor triggering beacon aiming as we also identified one condition (so far) in which even liqui..., We investigated beacon-aiming in the ant Camponotus japonicus under various substrate conditions. All experiments were conducted inside an opaque cylindrical arena. A vertical black rectangle (beacon) was placed on the inner wall of the arena. To minimise the potential influence of external cues, the beacon was placed in one of three possible positions, each separated by 120°, with trials evenly distributed across these positions. Each trial began with the ant placed at the centre of the floor. The behavioural sequence was recorded at 59.94 fps, until the ants reached the edge of the circular area used for analysis, as defined for each experiment.
Experiment (i): To investigate whether C. japonicus exhibits different orientation responses on land and water surfaces, three conditions were prepared: ‘Land-walking’ – walking on a dry substrate; and ‘Water-swimming’ – forced swimming in water; ‘Water-wading’ – walking (wading) in shallow water. Furthermore, the involvement of water rec..., , # Data from: Innate visual attraction before, during and after escape from adverse substrates in carpenter ants

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cnp5hqcfs](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cnp5hqcfs)

## Description of the data and file structure

We investigated beacon-aiming in the ant *Camponotus japonicus* under various substrate conditions. This experiment allowed us to probe the decision-making dynamics in ants before, during, and after the transition between substrates.

### Files and variables

#### File: dataset.zip

### Description of the data and file structure

The tracking data obtained using DeepLabCut or UMATracker is stored in CSV format.
The code for statistical analysis is provided in Python (.py) or R format (.R).

```
dataset.zip
|- rawdata/
| |- experiment1/ # single substrate conditions
| | |- land/ # ‘Land-walking’ conditions
| | | |- deeplabcut/ # XY coordinate data and the likelihood for each body part (head, thorax, petiole, gaster) from DeepLabCut
| | | ...,