Ants often walk backwards to drag large prey to their nest. New experiments show how they can use information from retinotopically encoded views to follow visual routes even while moving backwards. The mechanisms enabling ants to decouple body orientation and the control of travel direction are likely to be shared with other, flying, insects.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.12.037 | DOI Listing |
BMC Genomics
January 2025
College of Life Sciences, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, 710062, China.
Background: Chemosensory perception plays a vital role in insect survival and adaptability, driving essential behaviours such as navigation, mate identification, and food location. This sensory process is governed by diverse gene families, including odorant-binding proteins (OBPs), olfactory receptors (ORs), ionotropic receptors (IRs), chemosensory proteins (CSPs), gustatory receptors (GRs), and sensory neuron membrane proteins (SNMPs). The oriental mole cricket (Gryllotalpa orientalis Burmeister), an invasive pest with an underground, phyllophagous lifestyle, causes substantial crop damage.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhysiol Plant
January 2025
National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR), Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, New Delhi, India.
Plants defend against chewing herbivores by up-regulating jasmonic acid (JA) signaling, which activates downstream signaling cascades and produces numerous secondary metabolites that act as defense molecules against the herbivores. Although secondary metabolism always remains a focus of research, primary metabolism is also reported to be realigned upon herbivory. However, JA signaling-mediated modulation of primary metabolites and their metabolic pathways in plants are mostly unexplored.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Commun
January 2025
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University, 1-5 Yamadaoka, Suita, 5650871, Osaka, Japan.
Cyborg insects refer to hybrid robots that integrate living insects with miniature electronic controllers to enable robotic-like programmable control. These creatures exhibit advantages over conventional robots in adaption to complex terrain and sustained energy efficiency. Nevertheless, there is a lack of literature on the control of multi-cyborg systems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInsect Sci
January 2025
Functional Morphology and Biomechanics, Institute of Zoology, Kiel University, Kiel, Germany.
Water striders inhabit the elastic surface tension film of water, sharing their environment with other aquatic organisms. Their survival relies heavily on swift maneuverability and navigation around floating obstacles, which aids in the exploration of their habitat and in escaping from potential threats. Their high agility is strongly based on the ability to execute precise turns, enabling effective directional control.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiomimetics (Basel)
December 2024
Sussex AI, School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QJ, UK.
Visual navigation is a key capability for robots and animals. Inspired by the navigational prowess of social insects, a family of insect-inspired route navigation algorithms-familiarity-based algorithms-have been developed that use stored panoramic images collected during a training route to subsequently derive directional information during route recapitulation. However, unlike the ants that inspire them, these algorithms ignore the sequence in which the training images are acquired so that all temporal information/correlation is lost.
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