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The navigation of foraging insects : learning, explorating, commuting, and searching| old_uid | 13764 |
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| title | The navigation of foraging insects : learning, explorating, commuting, and searching |
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| start_date | 2017/04/06 |
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| schedule | 14h |
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| online | no |
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| details | Invité par Stéphane Viollet |
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| summary | Hymenopterans, such as bees and ants, travel repeatedly during the course of the day between their nests and different food sites. They navigate in a wide range of environments, from deserts (e.g the ants of the genus Cataglyphis) to tropical forests (e.g. the bee Euglossa bidentata), and on very different spatial scales, from few meters (e.g. pinpointing the nest entrance) to several kilometers, i.e. the foraging range of the animals.
Bumblebees have gathered a great attention from the scientific community for their amazing flying and navigational skills. Moreover, they are polinating a large variety of plants, and notably most plantations in green houses thanks to successful domestication.
Despite this great attention, the strategies employed by bumblebees to sucessfully commute repeatedly and efficiently between their nests and food sites is barely understood. Their foraging behaviour can be segragated in four phases : learning, explorating, commuting, and searching.
On the onset of their first foraging trip, bumblebees perform complex flight manoeuvers in the vicinity of their nest entrance. Those flights are thought to be driven by a strategy to promote the learning of cues surrouding their nest, and are thus called learning flight. The bumblebee will then seek for patches of flowers to gather nectars and pollen. Once a rewarding patch of flower has been found, the bumblebee needs to return to its home, avoiding the collision to objects laying along its path. The journey of the bee along its route may however be disrupted, due to wind gusts or navigational errors. The bee must then employs efficient search strategy to locate its route or its nest to resume its journey.
I will present nascent results on strategies employed by bumblebees during learning, commuting, and searching. We will see that the learning flights of bumblebee seem to be shaped to facilitate the extraction of distance around the bee but not around the nest entrance. The active gaze control strategy used to gather distance around the bee can further be used to control the flight across clutered terrain. Finally I will show that only two simple search strategies are necessary to guaranty a high probability to find its route after having been displaced away from it. |
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| responsibles | Fenouil |
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