The Cataglyphis Mahrèsienne: 50 years of Cataglyphis research at Mahrès

Every year since 1969, research groups from Zürich have spent the summer months in the barren sandy areas around the Tunisian village Mahrès to study the navigational behaviour of Cataglyphis desert ants, its sensory underpinnings, and ecophysiological settings. From the 1990s onwards, researchers from other countries were invited to join the Zürich group, so that Cataglyphis increasingly advanced to become a model organism for the study of animal navigation. Its cockpit became the focus of a dynamic research system, an 'epistemic thing', as modern parlance in the philosophy of science has it. Investigations aimed at the ants' compasses and odometers, at path integration, view-based landmark guidance, and how information from these various navigational routines is combined in computing the courses to steer. In this multifaceted work, the researchers' familiarity with the site, with Mahrès, and its local geographical and historical conditions, has been essential. The essay briefly retraces the historical development of this research system. After the system had been firmly established at the North African Mahrès site, it was extended to the ecological equivalents of Cataglyphis in other true deserts of the world, to Ocymyrmex in the Namib Desert of southern Africa, and to Melophorus in central Australia.