Take, for example, the Cataglyphis bicolor desert ant of the Sahara. Ant vision can go from non-existent to fantastic, depending on species, but you always have stride integration or UV perception or a number of other ways that implement a kind of "compass" for direction. Ants That Can Count Their Steps and Use the SunĮven trail-laying ants depend on other sensory modes for navigation. They navigate largely using their vision (check out the eyes on the one below in the photo courtesy of Alex Wild ) and can be shown to navigate largely using visual cues in laboratory experiments. These hunting ants can spot small prey from large distances away. So she managed to learn the path between the nest and food despite having been carried the whole way, facing backward! (the photo below is from Guénard and Silverman's article on tandem carrying ) Ants with Fantastic Visionĭon't forget about the ants with fantastic vision, like the Gigantiops destructor. In fact, Pachycondyla also have a strange behavior sometimes called "tandem carrying" where a worker can be carried to a food source and then can find her way back to her home nest without any chemical trails. Tandem running is also seen in Pachycondyla, like the ones shown below (photo courtesy Alex Wild ). To name a few more, you can find tandem running in carpenter ants like the Camponotus consobrinus shown below following a leader using a tactile non-trail-based tandem-running technique somewhat similar to the one described for Temnothorax. Moreover, Temnothorax ants aren't the only ones to do tandem running. Peculiarly, at roughly the same time the follower gives up, so does the leader. Eventually, the follower engages in circular search behavior for a while and eventually gives up. Occasionally, the follower gets lost trying to find the leader during an iteration. This process "teaches" the path to the follower (who moves her head back and forth during this process, perhaps visually encoding the path).
This process continues until both ants reach the target. This process involves the leader moving a short distance ahead and waiting until the follower touches her rear end. Such an ant leads her sisters to a new site through an iterative "tandem run" process. Tandem running - Tactile Recruitment, Visual NavigationĬonsider, for example, ants of the Temnothorax genus. In most cases, they can go about their work under the (anthropomorphic) assumption that they will someday find the old nest or be found by nestmates. Additionally, when ants do get "lost" (as in the army ant case), they don't typically have much reason to find a new home. Chemicals are not always used for navigation they're used for distributed computation. In particular, not all ants get "lost" when they lose their chemical trail. However, the "lost" narrative gets a little more complicated when you consider other sensory modalities that many other ants have.
So that's what happens when otherwise blind ants get separated with some partners: the blind leads the blind, and neither know any better.
Consequently, the group will go into a death spiral, circling in an "ant mill" until all ants die of exhaustion. In fact, when a section of foraging column gets separated, sometimes the head of the separated section will find its tail. These ants follow trails to a fault because they have no other way of navigating. It's true that there are blind army ants like Eciton (shown below in a Wikimedia Commons image originally contributed to the public domain by Alex Wild). Not all ants use pheromone trails to find their way.
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