Evidence of learning walks related to scorpion home burrow navigation

The Navigation by Chemotextural Familiarity Hypothesis (NCFH) suggests that scorpions use their midventral pectines to gather chemical and textural information near their burrows and use this information as they subsequently return home. For NCFH to be viable, animals must somehow acquire home-directed ″tastes″ of the substrate, such as through path integration (PI) and/or learning walks. We conducted laboratory behavioral trials using desert grassland scorpions (Paruroctonus utahensis). Animals reliably formed burrows in small mounds of sand we provided in the middle of circular, sand lined behavioral arenas. We processed overnight infrared video recordings with a MATLAB script that tracked animal movements at 1-2 s intervals. In all, we analyzed the movements of 23 animals, representing nearly 1500 hours of video recording. We found that once animals established their home burrows, they immediately made one to several short, looping excursions away from and back to their burrows before walking greater distances. We also observed similar excursions when animals made burrows in level sand in the middle of the arena (i.e., no mound provided). These putative learning walks, together with recently reported PI in scorpions, may provide the crucial home-directed information requisite for NCFH.

Young Offenders on the Camino de Santiago—Theoretical Background of the Learning Walks

Delinquent behaviour is predominantly an expression of adolescent developmental phases, but at the same time a possible entry into criminal careers. Where socio-educational measures and admonitions no longer help, society reacts with youth detention and imprisonment as a last resort, in doing so it brings the young people into an environment of violence and power. The concept of the socio-educational pilgrimage as an alternative measure to imprisonment takes the young people out of this context and offers space for reflection and self-efficacy. In this article, different concepts of Learning Walks for young offenders are discussed and theoretically analysed.

Learning walks in an Australian desert ant, Melophorus bagoti

The Central Australian ant Melophorus bagoti is the most thermophilic ant in Australia and forages solitarily in the summer months during the hottest period of the day. For successful navigation, desert ants of many species are known to integrate a path and learn landmark cues around the nest. Ants perform a series of exploratory walks around the nest before their first foraging trip, during which they are presumed to learn about their landmark panorama. Here, we studied 15 naïve M. bagoti ants transitioning from indoor work to foraging outside the nest. In three to four consecutive days, they performed 3 to 7 exploratory walks before heading off to forage. Naïve ants increased the area of exploration around the nest and the duration of trips over successive learning walks. In their first foraging walk, the majority of the ants followed a direction explored on their last learning walk. During learning walks, the ants stopped and performed stereotypical orientation behaviours called pirouettes. They performed complete body rotations with stopping phases as well as small circular walks without stops known as voltes. After just one learning walk, these desert ants could head in the home direction from locations 2 m from the nest, although not from locations 4 m from the nest. These results suggest gradual learning of the visual landmark panorama around the foragers’ nest. Our observations show that M. bagoti exhibit similar characteristics in their learning walks as other desert ants of the genera Ocymyrmex and Cataglyphis.

Tools to Change School Culture

A school leader's time is limited. Demands on time are increasing every day, and expectations on performance are at an all-time high. How can processes like collegial learning walks change a school into a dynamic learning organization? How can the leader help teachers engage students so that so that they are willing to persevere in spite of obstacles and gain confidence to be able to learn the content well enough that they can actually transfer what they learn to a different context on their own? This chapter will provide potential solutions for next generation leaders and will examine how the stages of learning can serve as the point of departure for processes that change school culture in meaningful ways as teachers and school leaders reflect on their pedagogical practice and on learning for everyone in the learning organization.

Digital Leadership and Professional Development

In order to successfully collaborate—whether in person, through technology, or using a hybrid of both methods—the participants of the collaboration must adopt a shared vision for the product of the partnership. A shared vision can be created by surveying group members' values and communicating about these ideas in order to build trust and respect among the collaborators. Through this process, which will be outlined in more detail in this chapter, collaborative leaders can work together with their partners to envision and realize projects that reach beyond what any individual could achieve alone. On a more concrete level, several practices have been proven to lead to more successful collaborative leadership. The ones that will be discussed in this chapter are learning walks, peer observation, professional learning networks, book studies, social networking, professional learning/networking communities, and video observations.

Magnetoreception in Hymenoptera: importance for navigation

The use of information provided by the geomagnetic field (GMF) for navigation is widespread across the animal kingdom. At the same time, the magnetic sense is one of the least understood senses. Here, we review evidence for magnetoreception in Hymenoptera. We focus on experiments aiming to shed light on the role of the GMF for navigation. Both honeybees and desert ants are well-studied experimental models for navigation, and both use the GMF for specific navigational tasks under certain conditions. Cataglyphis desert ants use the GMF as a compass cue for path integration during their initial learning walks to align their gaze directions towards the nest entrance. This represents the first example for the use of the GMF in an insect species for a genuine navigational task under natural conditions and with all other navigational cues available. We argue that the recently described magnetic compass in Cataglyphis opens up a new integrative approach to understand the mechanisms underlying magnetoreception in Hymenoptera on different biological levels.

Multimodal Influences on Learning Walks in Desert Ants (Cataglyphis fortis)

Ants are excellent navigators taking into account multimodal sensory information as they move through the world. To be able to accurately localise the nest at the end of a foraging journey, visual cues, wind direction and also olfactory cues need to be learnt. Learning walks are performed at the start of an ant’s foraging career or when the appearance of the nest surrounding has changed. We investigated here whether the structure of such learning walks in the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis takes into account wind direction in conjunction with the learning of new visual information. Ants learnt to travel back and forth between their nest and a feeder, and we then introduced a black cylinder near their nest to induce learning walks in regular foragers. By doing this across days with different prevailing wind directions, we were able to probe how ants balance the influence of different sensory modalities. We found that (i) the ants’ outwards headings are influenced by the direction of the wind with their routes deflected in such a way that they will arrive downwind of their nest when homing, (ii) a novel object along the route induces learning walks in experienced ants and (iii) the structure of learning walks is shaped by the wind direction rather than the position of the visual cue.

A generalized multi-snapshot model for 3D homing and route following

Inspired by the learning walks of the ant Ocymyrmex robustior, the original multi-snapshot model was introduced, which—in contrast to the classical “single snapshot at the goal” model—collects multiple snapshots in the vicinity of the goal location that subsequently can be used for homing, that is, for guiding the return to the goal. In this study, we show that the multi-snapshot model can be generalized to homing in three dimensions. In addition to capturing snapshots at positions shifted in all three dimensions, we suggest to decouple the home direction from the orientation of snapshots and to associate a home vector with each snapshot. We then propose a modification of the multi-snapshot model for three-dimensional route following and evaluate its performance in an accurate reconstruction of a real environment. As an illumination-invariant alternative to grayscale images, we also examine sky-segmented images. We use spherical harmonics as efficient representation of panoramic images enabling low memory usage and fast similarity estimation of rotated images. The results show that our approach can steer an agent reliably along a route, making it also suitable for robotic applications using on-board computers with limited resources.