Direct Evidence for Distance Measurement via Flexible Stride Integration in the Fiddler Crab

While on foraging excursions, fiddler crabs track their burrow location despite having no visual contact with it [1–5]. They do this by path integration [3, 6], a common navigational process in which motion vectors (the direction and distance of animals' movements) are summed to form a single “home vector” linking the current location with the point of origin [7]. Here, we identify the mechanism by which the integrator measures distance, by decoupling motor output from both inertial and visual feedback. Fiddler crabs were passively translated to a position such that the home vector lay across an acetate sheet on the ground. After being frightened, crabs tried to escape but slipped as they did so. Detailed high-speed video analysis reveals that crabs measure distance by integrating strides, rather than linear acceleration or optic flow: the number of steps they took depended on both the length of the home vector and how large their steps were, whether they slipped and fell short or not. This is the most direct evidence to date of a stride integrator [8, 9] that is flexible enough to account for significant variation in stride length and frequency.