Wystrach Lab

Research focus

ERC Consolidator Grant · 2023

Ant navigation: understanding the resilience and self-developing nature of mini-brains in interaction with their environment.

Organisms differ from machines in their resilience: their capacity to spontaneously recover from defects. This is because organisms, contrary to machines, are self-developing systems that change over time, like ‘a melody that sings itself’. The plastic mechanisms that enable animal and human self-development and resilience is barely known, but understanding them would profoundly impact how we apprehend brains, behaviours and their evolution. RESILI-ANT will tackle this question using the stunning ability of solitary foraging ants to visually navigate in complex environments. Ant navigational behaviours develop through stages with strong learning components, and can recover from…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.