Supplementary material from "Subtle changes in the landmark panorama disrupt visual navigation in a nocturnal bull ant"

Here, we had an opportunity to slightly modify the natural visual environment around the nest of the nocturnal bull ant Myrmecia pyriformis . We achieved this by felling three dead trees, two located along the typical route followed by the foragers of that particular nest and one in a direction perpendicular to their foraging direction.

An image difference analysis showed that the change in the overall panorama following the removal of these trees was relatively little. We filmed the behaviour of ants close to the nest and tracked their entire paths, both before and after the trees were removed. We found that immediately after the trees were removed, ants walked slower and were less directed.