How a salt pan ant <i>Cataglyphis fortis</i> navigates artificially complex environments

The desert ant Cataglyphis fortis inhabits the harsh and featureless North African saltpans. Individuals forage long distances and return to their inconspicuous nest entrance using path integration, but also rely on visual and olfactory landmarks. Here, we investigated the navigational decision making of these ants in differently structured environments. While individual ants show consistent route preferences, significant variability exists between individuals. Furthermore, the ants favor repetitive routes, suggesting that vision-based learning mechanisms and motor responses guide their navigation, with similar visual cues leading to similar egocentric decisions. This formation of idiosyncratic routes, seen in other ant species, appears to be conserved in C. fortis despite its usually flat habitat.