Bounded Plasticity in the Desert Ant’s Navigational Tool Kit

The spatial behavior of ants consists of the flexible and context-specific interaction of various task-specific routines operating within the realms of path integration and view-based landmark guidance. This chapter focuses on the degree of experience-dependent flexibility in the interplay between and even within these routines, and it describes experimental paradigms developed to study this interplay in desert ants, such as the interplay between global path integration vectors and local site-based steering commands. Due to the ant’s short life span and small brain size, the observed behavioral plasticity is largely bounded in experience-dependent and development-related ways. Experience- and development-dependent plasticity is also demonstrated within the neural circuitries of the ant’s mushroom body neuropils, where it occurs especially in the context of the major (indoor/outdoor) transition within the ant’s lifetime. Age-specific structural reorganization of microglomerular synaptic complexes is associated with experience-dependent transformations of these complexes from the default to the functional state.

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