We've all had the experience of getting lost while walking a seemingly familiar path. Your mind has wandered for only a few minutes, and, as you snap yourself back to reality, you look around to see nothing but unfamiliar surroundings. Most likely for us, a smartphone is close at hand and any initial panic is short-lived: we can simply turn on the GPS and let a mapping application guide us home.

Animals do not have this same luxury. So what do you do if you are a small insect — such as an ant on a foraging expedition — that has been displaced? How do you find your way home?

There are a variety of methods that ants use to navigate through their landscapes. Olfactory cues such as pheromone trails can be useful for some species. Alternatively, short-term memorisation of vectors (directions) and relative distances can help others simply "retrace their steps" back to the nest. But different landscapes, cognitive and sensory abilities call for different strategies. And one strategy that appears to be particularly important is using visual cues to point an ant homewards.

Trevor Murray, a postdoctoral scientist at the Australian National University, is part of a team of researchers — including Jochen Zeil's lab at ANU and Ajay Narendra's lab at Macquarie University — trying to figure out how such a small animal might utilise such seemingly complex information.