Ants use Sun and memories to navigate

Ants are even more impressive at navigating than we thought. Scientists say they can follow a compass route, regardless of the direction in which they are facing. It is the equivalent of trying to find your way home while walking backwards or even spinning round and round. Experiments suggest ants keep to the right path by plotting the Sun's position in the sky which they combine with visual information about their surroundings. "Our main finding is that ants can decouple their direction of travel from their body orientation," said Dr Antoine Wystrach of the University of Edinburgh and CNRS in Paris.