Data for research article "The interaction of path integration and terrestrial visual cues in navigating desert ants: what can we learn from path characteristics?"

Raw data for article appearing in the Journal of
Experimental Biology
Data shows the coordinates
of paths that ants took in 3 separate experiments. Experiment 1: Walking speeds of ants during
homing paths and nest searches.
Experiment 2: Observing ants’ responses to visual novelty. Experiment 3: Observing interactions between
path integration and visual guidance.

Path coordinates are provided as Matlab
files (see XtransfSmoothed and YtransfSmoothed in path structure) when
extracted from high-speed movies. You will need access to the Matlab environment to view these files. Path coordinates are provided as text documents when extracted from paper
recordings.

Abstract from research paper
Ant foragers make use of multiple
navigational cues to navigate through the world and the combination of innate
navigational strategies and the learning of environmental information is the
secret of their navigational success. We present here detailed information
about the paths of Cataglyphis fortis desert ants
navigating by an innate strategy, namely path integration. Firstly, we observe
that the ants’ walking speed decreases significantly along their homing paths,
such that they slow down just before reaching the goal, and maintain a slower
speed during subsequent search paths. Interestingly, this drop in walking speed
is independent of absolute home-vector length and depends on the proportion of
the home vector that was completed. Secondly, we find that ants are influenced
more strongly by novel or altered visual cues the further along their homing
path they are. These results suggest that path integration modulates speed
along the homing path in a way that might help ants search for, utilise or
learn environmental information at important locations. Ants walk more slowly
and sinuously when encountering novel or altered visual cues and occasionally
stop and scan the world, this might indicate the re-learning of visual
information.