Whenever you are lost, what do you do? Personally, I just open up Google Maps on my phone. However, what about ants? They don’t have Google Maps. How do they navigate to and from their nests?
You might have even seen one of the most common navigation techniques that ants use. Around your house or outside on sidewalks, you might have seen ant trails. Ants trails are a form of navigation. Ant trails are formed through chemical signals called pheromones. Worker ants lay down the pheromones as they move from their nests to a food source. Other workers then follow the pheromone trail to the food source. At the same time they also deposit pheromones, strengthening the trail.
However, there are lots of different species of ants that use different ways to navigate. What if ants don’t use pheromone trails to navigate? Ants like Melophorus bagoti, a species of desert ants, use visual cues to navigate. Scientists at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia placed a huge black artificial landmark behind the nest entrance, an obvious landmark. Then they removed the landmark and moved it to the left and right of its original location. When the landmark was removed and displaced a large distance, none of the ants were confused and went to the fictional nest. However, when the landmark was displaced a small distance, ants got confused and searched for a nest in front of the displaced landmark. The displacement also affected their route home to their actual nest. Scientists theorized that the large displacement didn’t affect the ant’s navigation because the distant panorama was too different from the panorama of the true nest location, while small displacement confused the ants because the fake nest panorama was similar to the true nest panorama. This experiment helped the scientists show that ants focus on the distant panorama in addition to landmarks for guidance.
Another navigation technique that ants use is path integration. Path integration is a navigation system where ants keep track of their position from their nests using self-motion cues like a pedometer or optic flow to keep track of their distance and direction. Using these motion cues, the ants keep track of a homing vector from their nests. This homing vector allows for the ant to navigate straight back to their nests instead of retracing their steps. A group of ant species famous for using this technique are Cataglyphis, desert ants. The desert ants keep track of their directional information through their celestial compass. That is, the ants use patterns of polarized sunlight and the sun’s position in the sky to determine direction. Before the desert ant’s celestial compass is calibrated, the desert ant relies on magnetic cues to provide direction information during their learning walks, the ants' first time leaving the nest. The young ants walk near the nest entrance, looping, and turning around using their magnetic compass to help develop their directional sense. Surprisingly, the desert ants don’t use their magnetic sense later in life. They switch to their celestial compass. The desert ants use a pedometer to keep track of the distance traveled. Scientists changed the desert ant’s stride lengths which affected their homing distance, the length of the ant’s path to their nest, showing that the desert ants use a pedometer. The scientists put the desert ants on stilts and shortened their legs. They found that when the desert ants were on stilts, the ants would overshoot their homing distance. In contrast, ants that had their legs shortened would undershoot their homing distance. Since changing the ant’s stride length corresponded to a change in distance traveled, instead of not affecting it all, it shows that the desert ants count their steps to keep track of the amount of distance traveled.
While I might have emphasized one type of navigation technique for each different ant species, many ant species use a combination of the mentioned navigation techniques to navigate. Now that y’all have gotten a taste of how ants navigate, how would y’all describe your navigation styles in terms of ant navigation? Personally, I align with pheromone trails the most because whenever I get lost, I just follow the crowd.
Media Credits:
[1] Photo by Alex Wild. https://www.alexanderwild.com/Ants/Making-a-Living/Tramps-and-Invaders/i-G6kfrL7/A
[2] Figure 2 from Wittlinger, M., et al. “The Desert Ant Odometer: A Stride Integrator That Accounts for Stride Length and Walking Speed.” Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 210, no. 2, 15 Jan. 2007, pp. 198–207, https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.02657.
Further Reading:
Collett, Thomas S., and Andrew O. Philippides. “Wood Ants Learn the Magnetic Direction of a Route but Express Uncertainty because of Competing Directional Cues.” Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 225, no. 16, 15 Aug. 2022, journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/225/16/jeb244416/276444/Wood-ants-learn-the-magnetic-direction-of-a-route, https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.244416. Accessed 11 Sept. 2022.
Langdon, W. B. “Evolving Open Complexity.” ACM SIGEVOlution, vol. 15, no. 1, Apr. 2022, pp. 1–4, https://doi.org/10.1145/3532942.3532945. Accessed 10 Dec. 2025.
Perna, Andrea, et al. “Individual Rules for Trail Pattern Formation in Argentine Ants (Linepithema Humile).” PLoS Computational Biology, vol. 8, no. 7, 19 July 2012, p. e1002592, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002592. Accessed 23 Nov. 2022.
Wittlinger, M., et al. “The Desert Ant Odometer: A Stride Integrator That Accounts for Stride Length and Walking Speed.” Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 210, no. 2, 15 Jan. 2007, pp. 198–207, https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.02657.
Wystrach, Antoine, et al. “Landmarks or Panoramas: What Do Navigating Ants Attend to for Guidance?” Frontiers in Zoology, vol. 8, no. 1, 2011, p. 21, https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-9994-8-21.
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