A stunning new video reconstructs the world through the eyes of a wasp and reveals why they never get lost or lose their nest, according to the Daily Mail. The team behind the video discovered that when ground-nesting wasps depart from their nests, they turn back towards home before embarking on a series of arcs that gradually increase. As their arcs gain height and distance over time, they retain their focus on the nest.
"Our findings tell us how wonderfully autonomous, flexible, and robust wasps are with their ability to know places in the world and shuttle back and forth between them," said Jochen Zeil, who participated in the research. "They share this fundamentally important skill with most animals on earth."
The research, stimulated by previous findings that showed the remarkably precise pattern of the arcs that wasps travel, took over 10 years to complete.
"I was especially surprised by how long it took us to find the right way of looking at what the wasps were doing," Zeil said. "It took us over 10 years!"
The video was created using a panoramic imager along the paths that wasps fly in order to create a 3D model of their environment and create views inside of these models. Afterwards, the team used these views to test specific predictions regarding the learning that takes place during wasp flights and how this learning guides their return home. These predictions were tested by simulating homing flights in virtual reality, according to Science Daily.
Wasps possess homing abilities that surpass anything humans have built by a huge margin, and the new results could help humans better understanding this process and use the results to create smarter flying robots, according to Science.
"It will be interesting to implement the learning and homing rules we found into flying robots to test the validity and limits of our findings," Zeil said. "We want to understand what trick the insects are using to acquire the competence of homing."
The findings were published in the Feb. 12 issue of Current Biology.
