Before a ground wasp leaves its home for a hunt, it goes into the air and undergoes a peculiar aerodynamic exercise. It loops in arcs around the nest and slowly gains height and distance prior to flying away. Now, scientists have recorded footage of this swirly trip from the insect's viewpoint.

Solitary wasps and other insects perform ‘learning flights’ at the time of leaving their nests, and make back to back loops around the nest site. And their comeback flights apparently mimic the patterns followed at the time of these ‘learning’ loop-de-loops.

Though scientists have discovered that such specialized departure flights help the wasps to familiarize themselves so that they could find the way back home after foraging, it wasn’t clear so far that how exactly they do so.

Scientists figured out the process over a period of few years, and their findings appeared online on February 11 in the journal Current Biology.

As per study co-author Jochen Zeil, who investigates ecological neuroscience at the Australian National University, the exercises performed by solitary ground wasps are carried out with precision and follow a different pattern common in insect species that execute learning flights.

In an email, Zeil told Live Science, “They back away from nest in series of widening arcs, pivoting around nest while looking back. While flying along these arcs, the insects see nest environment from different directions and distances, and always keep nest in their left or right visual field”.

However, to find out what exactly the ground wasps see during such flights, the researchers used high-speed cameras to record the departures and return flights of the wasps.

With the help of synchronized video cameras, scientists captured wasps’ movements when left their nests and then returned later during the day. They used software for tracking the head positions of wasps and to imagine the direction of their stare.