Animals live in heterogeneous environments where food resources are transient and have
to be exploited rapidly. Ants show a wide range of foraging strategies and this activity is …

Interest in the advanced cognitive abilities of insects has grown rapidly over the past
decades. However, most studies have taken place on a handful of model organisms: fruit …

Animals which regularly depart from and return to fixed positions in their environment can
resort to two principally different ways of navigation by using egocentric or geocentric …

More than 200 years ago, Lazzaro Spallanzani (Accademia d'Italia, 1934) wondered how
birds—sand martins in his case—found their way back home after they had been displaced …

Insect societies integrate many information sources to organize collective activities such as
foraging. Many ants use trail pheromones to guide foragers to food sources, but foragers can …

Ecologists have long sought to explain the coexistence of multiple potentially competing
species in local assemblages. This is especially challenging in species-rich assemblages in …

Our understanding of how sensory structure design is coupled with neural processing
capacity to adaptively support division of labor is limited. Workers of the remarkably …

We report here, the first evidence that ants Formica rufa L. exhibit a magnetic compass
response. For a period of seven days, foragers were trained to visit a food source accessed …

Solitary foraging ants commonly use visual cues from their environment for navigation.
Foragers are known to store visual scenes from the surrounding panorama for later …

The black carpenter ant Camponotus pennsylvanicus (DeGeer), a predominantly nocturnal
Formicine ant, responds to a hierarchy of visual and tactile cues when orienting along odor …