A pair of potentially interesting theoretical papers.
Here are two new papers which aren’t insect navigation per se, but they address theoretical questions which also apply to insect navigation. Firstly, Bode et al look at group movement and whether there are satisfactory analytical techniques to distinguish social from non-social group movements. Secondly, Issa and Zhang look at the requirements for Path Integration and how that might be implemented in nervous systems – with specific reference to grid cells in rodents.
Nikolai W. F. Bode, Daniel W. Franks, A. Jamie Wood, Julius J. B. Piercy, Darren P. Croft, Edward A. Codling (2012) Distinguishing Social from Nonsocial Navigation in Moving Animal Groups. The American Naturalist, Vol. 179, No. 5 (May 2012), pp. 621-632. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/665005
John B. Issa and Kechen Zhang (2012) Universal conditions for exact path integration in neural systems. PNAS. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1119880109
