Desert Navigator: The Journey of an Ant - Hardcover

Rüdiger Wehner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674045882 ISBN 13: 9780674045880

Publisher: Belknap Press, 2020

Synopsis

A world-renowned researcher of animal behavior reveals the extraordinary orienteering skills of desert ants, offering a thrilling account of the sophisticated ways insects function in their natural environments. Cataglyphis desert ants are agile ultrarunners who can tolerate near-lethal temperatures when they forage in the hot midday sun. But it is their remarkable navigational abilities that make these ants so fascinating to study. Whether in the Sahara or its ecological equivalents in the Namib Desert and Australian Outback, the Cataglyphis navigators can set out foraging across vast expanses of desert terrain in search of prey, and then find the shortest way home. For almost half a century, Rudiger Wehner and his collaborators have devised elegant experiments to unmask how they do it. Through a lively and lucid narrative, Desert Navigator offers a firsthand look at the extraordinary navigational skills of these charismatic desert dwellers and the experiments that revealed how they strategize and solve complex problems. Wehner and his team discovered that these insect navigators use visual cues in the sky that humans are unable to see, the Earth's magnetic field, wind direction, a step counter, and panoramic "snapshots" of landmarks, among other resources. The ants combine all of this information to steer an optimal course. At any given time during their long journey, they know exactly where to go. It is no wonder these nimble and versatile creatures have become models in the study of animal navigation. Desert Navigator brings to light the marvelous capacity and complexity found in these remarkable insects and shows us how mini brains can solve mega tasks.

About this title

About the Author

Rudiger Wehner is Professor Emeritus at the Brain Research Institute, University of Zurich. He is the recipient of the Marcel Benoist Prize, the Carus Medal of the Leopoldina, the Karl von Frisch Medal and Science Prize, the King Faisal International Prize for Science, and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award. He is an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and principal author of the well known textbook Zoologie.

Edition details

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674045882
• ISBN 13: 9780674045880
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416