Department of Biology, Lund University, Lund 223 62, Sweden.
Departamento de Ecologia, IBUSP, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.
Biol Lett. 2020 Aug;16(8):20200437. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2020.0437. Epub 2020 Aug 26.
Most flying animals rely primarily on visual cues to coordinate and control their trajectory when landing. Studies of visually guided landing typically involve animals that decrease their speed before touchdown. Here, we investigate the control strategy of the stingless bee , which instead accelerates when landing on its narrow hive entrance. By presenting artificial targets that resemble the entrance at different locations on the hive, we show that these accelerated landings are triggered by visual cues. We also found that initiated landing and extended their legs when the angular size of the target reached a given threshold. Regardless of target size, the magnitude of acceleration was the same and the bees aimed for the same relative position on the target suggesting that use a computationally simple but elegant 'stereotyped' landing strategy that requires few visual cues.
大多数飞行动物主要依靠视觉线索来协调和控制着陆时的轨迹。视觉引导着陆的研究通常涉及在触地前降低速度的动物。在这里，我们研究了无刺蜜蜂的控制策略，它在窄小的蜂巢入口处着陆时会加速。通过呈现类似于蜂巢上不同位置入口的人工目标，我们表明这些加速着陆是由视觉线索触发的。我们还发现，蜜蜂在目标的角度尺寸达到给定阈值时开始着陆并伸展它们的腿。无论目标大小如何，加速度的大小都是相同的，蜜蜂瞄准目标的相对位置也是相同的，这表明蜜蜂使用了一种计算简单但优雅的“刻板”着陆策略，只需要很少的视觉线索。
