PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Roman Goulard
AU  - Cornelia Buehlmann
AU  - Jeremy E. Niven
AU  - Paul Graham
AU  - Barbara Webb
TI  - Transfer of orientation memories in untethered wood ants (<em>Formica rufa</em>) from walking in an arena to walking on a motion compensation treadmill
AID  - 10.1101/2020.05.29.084905
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.05.29.084905
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/05/30/2020.05.29.084905.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/05/30/2020.05.29.084905.full
AB  - The scale of natural insect navigation during foraging makes it challenging to study, in a controlled way, the navigation processes that an insect brain can support. Virtual Reality and trackball setups have offered experimental control over visual environments while studying tethered insects, but potential limitations and confounds introduced by tethering motivates the development of alternative untethered solutions. In this paper we validate the use of a motion compensator (or ‘treadmill’) to study visually-driven behaviour of freely moving wood ants (Formica rufa). We show how this setup allows naturalistic walking behaviour and motivation over long timeframes. Furthermore, we show that ants are able to transfer associative and navigational memories from classical maze and arena contexts to our treadmill. Thus, we demonstrate the possibility to study navigational behaviour over ecologically relevant durations (and virtual distances) in precisely controlled environments, bridging the gap between natural and highly controlled laboratory experiments.Summary statement We have developed and validated a motion compensating treadmill for wood ants which opens new perspectives to study insect navigation behaviour in a fully controlled manner over ecologically relevant durations.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.