Lernstrategien und visuelle Information für die Lokalisation eines Ziels beim Navigationsverhalten von Hummeln: Eine kombinierte Analyse auf der Verhaltens-, der neuronalen und der Modellebene

• Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Martin Egelhaaf
• Fachliche Zuordnung: Biologie des Verhaltens und der Sinne
• Förderung: Förderung von 2012 bis 2018
• Projektkennung: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 221785424

Bees and other hymenopteran insects use visual memories to locate their nests and/or food sites. They return repeatedly to these places in the course of the day, seldom missing their goal. Navigation takes place on a wide range of spatial scales: on a scale within the foraging range of the animal (i.e. within hundreds of metres and even kilometres; ‘global navigation’) as well as on a small scale (i.e. within few metres) when it comes to pinpointing the precise location of the goal (‘local navigation’). Although it is known for long that visual information plays a dominant role for locating a virtually invisible goal during local navigation of hymenopterans and that this information is learnt by active learning strategies, it is still not clear and highly controversial which environmental features or, in other words, what type of information is stored during the learning flights and later used for finding the goal. To understand the mechanisms underlying local navigation we will focus on answering two particularly relevant still open key questions: What information is learnt and used for goal localisation during local navigation, how is this information tied to the spatio-temporal organisation of learning and subsequent homing behaviour, and how is the learning process organised in environments that may change over time and, thus, are predictable to only some extent? How is this behaviourally relevant information represented by the spatio-temporal neural activity patterns in the visual system and how is this information used by the motor controller when mediating local navigation behaviour? For methodological reasons, we will perform our experimental work with bumblebees, which show local navigation behaviour very similar to that of honeybees. The project will combine behavioural analyses with electrophysiological experiments at the neural level and with model simulations.

• DFG-Verfahren: Sachbeihilfen
• Beteiligte Personen: Dr. Roland Kern; Dr. Jens Peter Lindemann