How desert ants adapt when they lose sight in one eye

What is it about?

Desert ants use their eyes to navigate when searching for food and returning to their nests. They memorize their surroundings visually, which helps them follow learned routes quickly and efficiently. We explored how ants handle changes in their visual perception by covering one of their two eyes. When this happened, the ants struggled to follow familiar routes at first but adapted within hours by practicing and re-learning their paths. Interestingly, the ants didn’t erase their old memories (formed with two eyes) but created new ones for one-eyed navigation. However, if they learned a route using one eye, they couldn’t recognize it when both eyes were uncovered, even with more visual information available. This shows that ants’ memory and navigation depend on seeing the world as a whole, using both eyes.

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Photo by Eddie Blair on Unsplash

Photo by Eddie Blair on Unsplash

Why is it important?

There are two main important findings in our study. First, foraging routes and their surrounding scenes learned with two eyes can only be recognized with two eyes and scenes learned with one eye can only be recognized with one eye (the same eye), showing that ants store egocentric inputs rather than a spatial model of the world. Second, after covering (or uncovering) one eye, ants—which can no longer recognize their familiar surroundings—do not remain dysfunctional for long. They engage in a step-by-step learning process to store the novel visual inputs in a parallel memory and resume normal foraging activity in a matter of hours.

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