desert ants learn vibration and magnetic landmarks沙漠蚂蚁学习振动和磁场地标.pdfVIP

Desert Ants Learn Vibration and Magnetic Landmarks Cornelia Buehlmann, Bill S. Hansson., Markus Knaden*. Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, Germany Abstract The desert ants Cataglyphis navigate not only by path integration but also by using visual and olfactory landmarks to pinpoint the nest entrance. Here we show that Cataglyphis noda can additionally use magnetic and vibrational landmarks as nest-defining cues. The magnetic field may typically provide directional rather than positional information, and vibrational signals so far have been shown to be involved in social behavior. Thus it remains questionable if magnetic and vibration landmarks are usually provided by the ants’ habitat as nest-defining cues. However, our results point to the flexibility of the ants’ navigational system, which even makes use of cues that are probably most often sensed in a different context. Citation: Buehlmann C, Hansson BS, Knaden M (2012) Desert Ants Learn Vibration and Magnetic Landmarks. PLoS ONE 7(3): e33117. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0033117 Editor: Stephen Pratt, Arizona State University, United States of America Received January 2, 2012; Accepted February 8, 2012; Published March 7, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Buehlmann et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This study was supported financially by the Max Planck Society. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: This study was su