United Kingdom

Many animals make direct paths back to their homes after tortuous foraging trips using a navigational strategy called path integration. During path integration, sensory information for direction and distance measurements are used to estimate the straightest path back to home. Decades of work with honeybees have established that they are excellent path integrators that rely primarily on celestial cues for orientation and optic flow for measuring speed/distance while in flight. While path integration has been well studied behaviorally, the neural basis of vector memory formation is unknown in any animal. A detailed 3D electron-microscopical map of the navigation center of the bumblebee’s brain, the central complex, and a comprehensive anatomically-grounded computational circuit model suited to carry out path integration from these data predicts concrete cellular substrates for all computations required for path integration in the central complex. However, the ability to test the hypotheses the model raises in bumblebees is lacking. Working towards this goal, we have developed circular navigation arenas with a hidden nest entrance and feeder to demonstrate that bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) use path integration over relatively short distances while walking. By manipulating artificial celestial cues in the arena, we demonstrate that bumblebees orient to overhead polarization patterns and artificial sunspots when navigating back to their nest while walking. Also, by displacing actively foraging bumblebees to an identical arena lacking a nest, we show that bumblebees accurately estimate the distances they must travel while walking home to find their nests. These result, when paired with neuroanatomical data of the bumblebee central complex and hypotheses generated by computational models, offer the potential to investigate the neural basis of path integration in bumblebees in the near future.

Navigation 2021

Path integration in walking bumblebees

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SEB Conference 2025

SEB’s Annual Conference is celebrated for creating the perfect composition of research, new discoveries and collaborative connections. Be creative and innovative by exchanging ideas and knowledge with masters of biology from all over the world.

lightning talk

### Welcome to Navigation 2021!

Our aim was to bring diverse disciplines together to stimulate insights and knowledge sharing towards a more navigable world. We hope we achieved this!

Navigation and timing are critical to the world we all inhabit. We believe that the work of the wider navigation community enables societal benefit including support to national grand challenges and also the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. To achieve this requires collaboration and understanding across science, technology and practice.

Navigation 2021 is about much more than technology innovation, it also showcases science and research from across the wider community, including animal navigation, cognition and human factors.


Our aim was to bring diverse disciplines together to stimulate insights and knowledge sharing towards a more navigable world. We hope we achieved this!

Low anthropogenic electromagnetic radiation, also known as “electromagnetic noise” or “electrosmog”, disturbs magnetic compass orientation in migrant songbirds under laboratory conditions. Since electric devices continuously emit equally low electromagnetic noise wherever humans live, it is a biologically highly relevant debated, yet still unsolved question of worldwide importance, whether electromagnetic noise affects the migratory behaviour of free-flying migrant birds in the wild. If so, ecological consequences were global and had wide-ranging implications from animal conservation to human health issues. Therefore, we conducted field experiments to assess the potential after-effects of electromagnetic noise on wild night-migratory songbirds. Similar to the laboratory experiments, we exposed European Robins (Erithacus rubecula) and Northern Wheatears (Oenanthe oenanthe) to electromagnetic radiation, but released the birds afterwards to observe a potential after-effect in their migratory behaviour via radio-tracking. Additionally, we measured birds’ migratory motivation in another experiment. We found no biological relevant effects of electromagnetic radiation on the migratory motivation, and no after-effects on the probability to resume migration, the departure timing within the night, their initial and continued (~50 km) flight direction. However, Wheatears in the electromagnetic noise-exposed group departed significantly later than the controls. As the difference in timing was only 30 seconds in median, in comparison to several hours of nocturnal migration time, we consider this effect as biologically irrelevant. Nevertheless, it shows that these birds put more weight on accuracy in their migratory decision than on speed, when sensing is disturbed or no information form the Earth’s magnetic field available, which is in line with evidence-accumulation-theory. Birds were either able to detect the magnetic field directly after electromagnetic noise exposure or switched to alternative compass systems. We want to highlight that finding no after-effect in our study design does not mean that this man-made factor might not affect migrating birds in other circumstances.

No apparent effect of anthropogenic electromagnetic radiation on the migratory behaviour of wild songbirds

GALILEO Global Navigation Satellite System: from Reality into the future of Navigation on Earth and beyond

Session 2.1.

AIMGNSS – A tool and framework for investigating the application of Machine Learning techniques to GNSS anomaly detection

A simple decoder of GNSS non-systematic convolutional codes

A Resilient National Timing Architecture

A Mixed Integer Least-Squares Formulation of the GNSS Snapshot Positioning Problem

Session 2.2.

Lost in spatial translation: The relevance of memory for real-world navigation and the effect of Alzheimer’s disease on allocentric and egocentric processing

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No apparent effect of anthropogenic electromagnetic radiation on the migratory behaviour of wild songbirds

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