Fig. 5: Computer simulated central-place foraging routes.

At dawn, the simulated insect searches for food and stores the food location after finding it. It then returns to its nest. It tries to repeat foraging to the food location every hour until sunset, using (a) a model without time compensation, (b) the hour-angle model, or (c) our complete model. d) Euclidean distance (m) of the search centroid from the feeder (red) or the nest (green) using the three models. Each box shows the quartiles of the data (n = 9 samples span over Aug 2, 2024; the initial foraging route is excluded). The whiskers extend to show the rest of the distribution except for points that exceed 1.5 × the inter-quartile range, which are marked as outliers. The green dashed line indicates the homing error of desert ants in a similar foraging scenario⁴⁰. e Homing error as a function of foraging duration (normalised for foraging distance). Solid lines show the mean error when using the no-compensation (grey), the hour-angle (blue) or the complete model (yellow). Shaded areas are the 95% confidence interval (CI). In all the results there is 20% added compass noise.