Homing in the arachnid taxa Araneae and Amblypygi
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REVIEW
Homing in the arachnid taxa Araneae and Amblypygi Joaquín Ortega‑Escobar1 Received: 22 November 2019 / Revised: 19 August 2020 / Accepted: 28 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Adequate homing is essential for the survival of any animal when it leaves its home to find prey or a mate. There are several strategies by which homing can be carried out: (a) retrace the outbound path; (b) use a ‘cognitive map’; or (c) use path integration (PI). Here, I review the state of the art of research on spiders (Araneae) and whip spiders (Amblypygi) homing behaviour. The main strategy described in the literature as being used by these arachnids is PI. Behavioural and neural substrates of PI are described in a small group of spider families (Agelenidae, Lycosidae, Gnaphosidae, Ctenidae and Theraphosidae) and a whip spider family (Phrynidae). In spiders, the cues used to detect the position of the animal relative to its home are the position of the sun, polarized light patterns, web elasticity and landmarks. In whip spiders, the cues used are olfactory, tactile and, with a more minor role, visual. The use of a magnetic field in whip spiders has been rejected both with field and laboratory studies. Concerning the distance walked in PI, the possibility of using optic flow and idiothetic information in spiders is considered. The studies about outbound and inbound paths in whip spiders seem to suggest they do not follow the PI rules. As a conclusion, these arachnids’ navigation relies on multimodal cues. We have detailed knowledge about the sensory origin (visual, olfactory, mechanosensory receptors) of neural information, but we are far from knowing the central neural structures where sensory information is integrated. Keywords Homing · Spiders · Amblypygids · Optic flow · Polarized-light navigation · Idiothetic orientation · Olfaction · Web elasticity · Landmarks
Introduction Homing is the behaviour by which an animal can go from its present place to a new one, and then return to the first place. The first place is normally its nest or the place where it lives. The goal is attractive because prey or mates can be found there. To return from the goal to its nest or living place the animal can use three strategies: (a) retrace the outbound path, (b) use a ‘cognitive map’, representing geometric information of relevant landmarks in the environment of the animal (Wehner and Menzel 1990) or (c) use path integration (PI) (Mittelstaedt 1983). To carry out PI, the animal must be kept informed about the translational and rotational components of its movement and integrate them in a home vector that carries it back to its departure point (Cheung et al. 2012; Heinze et al. 2018; Wehner and Srinivasan 2003). This home * Joaquín Ortega‑Escobar [email protected] 1
School of Psychology, University Autónoma of Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain
vector is stored in its memory and could be used for the next foraging trip by a simple reversal of it. The procedure commonly used to investigate wh
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