29 July 2026
Ants and bees are known to use spatial memories to navigate to fixed locations, such as a nest. Virtual-reality experiments in which Drosophila fruit flies follow fictive odour plumes now show that these insects use components of a similar memory-guided navigational toolkit to track the edge of a plume towards its source.
This is a summary of: Siliciano, A. F. et al. A vector-based strategy for olfactory navigation in Drosophila. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10827-7 (2026).
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