The Ant Odometer: Stepping on Stilts and Stumps
Abstract
Desert ants, Cataglyphis, navigate in their vast desert habitat by path integration. They continuously integrate directions steered (as determined by their celestial compass) and distances traveled, gauged by as-yet-unknown mechanisms. Here we test the hypothesis that navigating ants measure distances traveled by using some kind of step integrator, or “step counter.” We manipulated the lengths of the legs and, hence, the stride lengths, in freely walking ants. Animals with elongated (“stilts”) or shortened legs (“stumps”) take larger or shorter strides, respectively, and concomitantly misgauge travel distance. Travel distance is overestimated by experimental animals walking on stilts and underestimated by animals walking on stumps.
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Funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung (I/78 580 to H.W. and R.W.), the Swiss National Science Foundation (3100-61844 to R.W.), and the Universities of Ulm and Zürich.
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Published In

Science
Volume 312 | Issue 5782
30 June 2006
30 June 2006
Copyright
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 2 March 2006
Accepted: 26 May 2006
Published in print: 30 June 2006
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