Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 117, Issue 49, Pages 31494-31499Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2016872117
Keywords
affordances; insect flight; self-size perception; navigation; cluttered environments
Categories
Funding
- Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) [EG82/19-1]
- Center of Excellence EX 277 Cognitive Interaction Technology - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy [EXC 2117-422037984]
- Zukunftskolleg Independent Research Grant [P82967018 FP 330 670/18]
- Max Planck Society
- Couzin lab
- NVIDIA corporation
- United States National Institutes of Health [R01EY029745]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Animals that move through complex habitats must frequently contend with obstacles in their path. Humans and other highly cognitive vertebrates avoid collisions by perceiving the relationship between the layout of their surroundings and the properties of their own body profile and action capacity. It is unknown whether insects, which have much smaller brains, possess such abilities. We used bumblebees, which vary widely in body size and regularly forage in dense vegetation, to investigate whether flying insects consider their own size when interacting with their surroundings. Bumblebees trained to fly in a tunnel were sporadically presented with an obstructing wall containing a gap that varied in width. Bees successfully flew through narrow gaps, even those that were much smaller than their wingspans, by first performing lateral scanning (side-to-side flights) to visually assess the aperture. Bees then reoriented their in-flight posture (i.e., yaw or heading angle) while passing through, minimizing their projected frontal width and mitigating collisions; in extreme cases, bees flew entirely sideways through the gap. Both the time that bees spent scanning during their approach and the extent to which they reoriented themselves to pass through the gap were determined not by the absolute size of the gap, but by the size of the gap relative to each bee's own wingspan. Our findings suggest that, similar to humans and other vertebrates, flying bumblebees perceive the affordance of their surroundings relative their body size and form to navigate safely through complex environments.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available