Here’s How Ants and Other Animals Find Their Way Home

Home Biology Here’s How Ants and Other Animals Find Their Way Home

Biology

By Trista - January 15, 2020

When humans need to go back and forth from their homes to other places, they usually rely on street names, landmarks, or GPS instructions on their phones to get them where they need to go. It seems like an easy way to navigate and get around safely, but how do animals do so without technology on their side?

Many animals, especially birds, travel for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles when they migrate south for the winter and back north to their homes. How do they manage not to get lost in the process when there is no way for them to know where to go? Animal navigation, depending on the species, is actually quite fascinating and a complicated process.

Here’s How Ants and Other Animals Find Their Way Home — *Ants are great at working together to get the job done. Photo Credit: frank60/Shutterstock*

1. The Talents of Ants

In order to keep the colony alive, red ants venture away from their nest to search for food. They can travel great distances to do so, and when they do find some, they will pick up any morsel in their tiny jaws and carry it all the way back home.

Nevertheless, being that small, how can they tell that they are going in the right direction? Any leaf may look like another one, so it is probably effortless for them to get lost. What is even worse is that with the food they have found, they are forced to walk backward, dragging the food behind them, so how do animals even know they are going the right way?

NEXT >>

2. The Many Ways Ants Don’t Get Lost

One of the ways ants find their way back home is by recognizing familiar scenery. For an insect so small, this requires a high level of visual sophistication that was never thought possible before. Ants are capable of navigating their environment by looking around and seeing what they recognize in order to find their way back to the nest.

Another method is something called path integration. When the ants are taking a particular path, they’re committing to memory each twist and turn they made, as well as how many steps were taken during each part of their journey. This allows them to calculate the fastest route back home without getting lost. That is quite impressive!

<< Previous

NEXT >>

3. Ants “Peek”

Ants also use a method called peeking; when these tiny animals are traveling backward while carrying food with them, they’ll occasionally stop and turn around to peek behind them and find familiar landmarks so that animals know they’re going in the right direction.

This occasional “stopping to peek” keeps animals on the right track so that they know they’re heading home instead of heading in the wrong direction and ending up somewhere else.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

4. Testing Their Peeking

Studies were conducted by scientists at Paul Sabatier University to see how often ants would peek when certain obstacles were placed around them. The study took place in the desert, where there were fewer landmarks that ants could actually use.

A number of the ants were moved and were provided with a crumb of cookie to take back. During their travels, the scientists would place “landmarks” in the form of tarps and black plastic bags to look like mountains in the distance. Ants on this new path would “peek” after only 3.2 meters, while ants who were familiar with the path “peeked” after 6 meters.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

5. Ants Have Great Eyesight

So it begs the question: how could something so small be so observant about its surroundings? The answer lies in the ant’s vision. They have nearly 360 degrees of vision, while humans can only see about ⅓ of their surroundings without turning their heads.

This feature means that ants are taking in information all the time through their eyes, using visual cues to determine if they are heading in the right direction back to their nests.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

6. Other Means of Navigation

Ants are not the only creatures who use complex methods of finding their homes. Birds migrate year after year to the same spots with the changing of the seasons without getting lost. Are they just following the rest of the flock, or are there more involved?

Charles Darwin suggested one method of possible navigation called dead reckoning (which is now called path integration). Animals would determine their current position by taking into account how fast they have traveled in comparison to their starting point. However, there are many other means of navigation that animals are using to get around.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

7. Remembered Landmarks

Some animals, such as birds and insects, are actually capable of using landmarks in their environments to get around. They take note of specific structures and use them to determine whether they are going in the right direction and their current location.

However, human intervention has interfered with this process over the years, with the development of structures and removal of trees, which end up changing the overall landscape. It takes animals some time to adjust to these changes before they’re able to navigate again.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

8. Using the Sun

Some animals have what is called a sun compass. The sandhopper, for example, uses the sun and its own internal clock to navigate. Since the sun moves in a steady path across the sky from East to West, it’s easy to determine its relative location.

The movement of the sun also helps animals to maintain their circadian rhythm: their sleeping and waking cycle. They will return to their homes when they notice that the sun is near the horizon in the West, a clear signal that nighttime is coming.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

9. Conducted Tests

To put these navigation methods to the test, the sandhoppers were placed in an environment with artificial lighting, which was gradually changed over time until they were 12 hours out of phase with the natural cycle.

Then when they were reintroduced back into their natural environments, they resorted to their usual methods of using the sun to determine if they should move up the beach or head back into the water.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

10. Flying By Night

Just as sailors used to use the stars to determine which direction they should sail in, nocturnal animals also use the night sky to determine the correct direction of the South.

A study was conducted by placing warblers in a planetarium displaying the night sky. They would fly south, depending on the locations of the displayed stars. When the sky was rotated, they would maintain that direction according to the positions of the stars in the sky. This notion is a fascinating skill since taking such measurements usually requires a sextant and a chronometer.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

11. Polarized Moonlight

The dung beetle is even more fascinating with the method it uses to get around in the middle of the desert. It actually uses the polarization patterns of moonlight. On a clear night, it can navigate when only the Milky Way or clusters of bright stars are visible.

This concept makes it the only known insect to use the galaxy itself to determine where it is going, and the first discovered animal to use this method of navigation.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

12. Using Polarized Light

Some animals, such as bees, are susceptible to the polarization of light. Even when skies are cloudy, they can use polarized light to determine the approximate position of the sun in the sky so that they can figure out which direction to travel in.

When a honey bee finds a food source, they fly back to the hive and communicate this information to the rest of the bees in a wiggling dance. The other bees interpret this information to find the approximate location of the food source so that they know where to fly.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

13. Magnetoreception

Magnetoreception is an animal’s ability to use the Earth’s natural magnetic field to determine its orientation so that it knows which direction to go. This is most common in birds, such as homing pigeons. Underground animals, such as blind mole rats, are also sensitive to this magnetic field and use it for navigation purposes.

Studies were done on homing pigeons where they were time-shifted to another zone. The results showed that they were not able to navigate. However, when the days were overcast, they were able to choose the right direction. This idea led scientists to speculate that birds first use the sun for navigation, and then rely on the magnetic field second on cloudy days.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

14. Olfaction

This method is the use of smell to determine familiarity with the location. Think of when dogs get lost and manage to sniff their way back home after a long period of time being away.

Animals like salmon use olfaction as well, smelling the cues in a river to determine if this is where they developed as spawn. However, it is a combination of two methods: salmon use their magnetic senses to navigate toward the rivers from the ocean, and then use olfaction to determine which river is “theirs.”

<< Previous

NEXT >>

15. Gravity Receptors

Scientists also believe that homing pigeons may be able to sense gravitational differences and use that to navigate their way back home. Scientists in Ukraine conducted a study to determine just this, with the use of a meteorite crater.

Gravity was a bit weaker at this point, and they tested to see what would happen to homing pigeons if they flew over the crater: would they continue in the same direction or change course?

<< Previous

NEXT >>

16. Disruption of The Senses

The scientists picked 26 birds for the study that had been trained to return to a specific location. Eighteen of the birds returned home successfully, and only seven of them were able to pick the right direction and head in the direction of home without much deviation.

The other birds first took off in random directions when they crossed the edge of the meteor impact. The birds had been equipped with small GPS trackers to track their flight paths, which revealed that the birds took off in seemingly wild directions before they were able to reorient themselves in the right direction.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

17. Way-Marking

This type of movement is a unique method of navigation and is most commonly seen in the wood mouse. The wood mouse actually picks up objects in their environment and places them to be used as landmarks so that they know which way to go on the way back home.

Leaves and twigs are the most commonly used items, and once the area has been explored, they will move them to other areas so that they can keep track of where their homes are located.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

18. Path Integration

Path integration, as mentioned earlier, is actually an intricate use of math to determine location. It sums up the vectors of distance, and the direction traveled from the starting point in order to create a path that returns a person (or animal) to the start.

Animals put together different cues taken from various sensory sources, without relying on visual information or landmarks. Idiothetic (self-proposition) cues from within the body are listened to in order to find one’s way back. It is all quite complicated and considers methods and processes that would be too complicated to put into layman’s terms.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

19. Chemical Navigation

This one is a bit different from olfaction, which smells out the familiarity of an area. Instead, animals leave a chemical trail behind them, usually through the use of pheromones, which they then follow back to their starting point.

Some ants will leave a chemical trail behind for other ants to follow so that they can find the source of food. Thankfully, this trail only lasts about two minutes so that ants are not following false, old trails that lead to nothing. However, it does force them to hasten their journey so that they do not miss out.

<< Previous

NEXT >>

20. The Use of Other Senses

Several other methods are used to navigate. For example, bats use echolocation for orientation as well as detecting prey in the air. They use this information to avoid obstacles and to find their way back home eventually.

Aquatic animals such as seals use hydrodynamic reception, where they sense disturbances in the water. This feature can help them catch fast-swimming fish as well as scope the paths ahead of them so that they can get on the right paths back home.

<< Previous