Visual navigation in ants: from visual ecology to brain

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All animals have a basic sense of direction, but most can also learn cues in their environment to enable them to navigate between familiar locations. For both humans and ants, these learnt guidance cues are primarily visual, and autonomous robots are being developed that use similar cues. Our goal is to understand how the tiny brain of the ant is capable of supporting navigational feats - without GPS - that are superior to any current robots, and often better than humans. Ants have strong evolutionary pressure to be successful navigators, as to survive they need to forage for food and bring it back to their nest. They have been shown to rapidly learn visual cues surrounding nest and food locations, and to develop memories for long routes through complex terrain between these key locations. But what is stored in memory, and how is used to guide behaviour? Alternative hypotheses include: A) they store 'snapshots' of the surrounding scene from a particular point of view and try to match these when returning to the same place; B) they detect prominent landmarks or features, and use those locations to triangulate their position; C) they process the visual scene into a compact and robust internal representation that they can use flexibly to recognise their current location and to determine the correct course to a goal.We will use a mixture of experiments and modelling on wood ants to investigate these possibilities. Our approaches will include 'top-down' analysis of what information is actually available in the natural scenery of the wood ant habitat for navigation, and bottom-up investigation of which brain areas seem to be crucial in navigational tasks. The latter approach is motivated by evidence from other insects that memory of patterns (consistent with hypothesis A) are stored in a brain area called the mushroom bodies, whereas abstracted directional information (consistent with hypothesis C) is processed in a different area, the central complex. We will carry out the first ever experiments to test if brain lesions in these areas affect visual navigation in ants. We will also develop a novel treadmill system in which ants can be placed on a sphere, and walk freely while their forward and rotational motion is compensated to keep them in the same position and orientation. This will allow us to test ants in a virtual world in which we can independently manipulate different parts or properties of the visual scene, and track the immediate effect on navigational decisions. This work will be complemented by developing an equivalent 'virtual ant' simulation that can be tested with the same experimental stimuli. The brain of our virtual ant will contain computational algorithms corresponding to the hypotheses above, so that we can predict what the real ant should do if that hypothesis is correct. We will also test neural network models corresponding to the brain circuits tested in the lesioning experiments. Understanding the ant brain should give us insight into navigational mechanisms used by other animals, including humans, and also suggest new solutions for technology.