Dr. Toni Wöhrl

Climbing behaviours in ants

Ants are ecologically successful in various habitats and are known to move with a robust alternating tripod gait. Thus, one crucial factor for the success of the ants, or in a broader perspective six-legged animals, could be in the advantages of their locomotor system. To understand how ants engage their legs and body parts on slopes to progress without slipping or uncontrolled tipping, we measured and compared the reaction forces and joint trajectories of individual ant legs and body segments.

Boudinot BE, Casadei-Ferreira A, Wöhrl T, Probst RS, Lieberman ZE, Czekanski-Moir J, Richter A (2025) Ecomorphology of ants. In Insect Ecomorphology. Academic Press. pp 469-524.

Bähr F, Wöhrl T, Teich P, Puta C, Kliegl R (2025). Impact of Age, Sex, Body Constitution, and the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Physical Fitness of 38,084 German Primary School Children. Scientific Reports, 15: 11300.

Teich P, Arntz F, Wöhrl T, Bähr F, Golle K, Kliegl R (2025) Association of school social status with Covid-19 pandemic-related changes and post-pandemic rebounds of children’s physical fitness. Sports Medicine – Open, 11(1), 41.

Bähr F, Wöhrl T, Teich P, Puta C, Kliegl R (2024). Impact of height-to-mass ratio on physical fitness of German third-grade children.

Chahoud O, Sansom T, Wöhrl T, Oberst S (2024) Design of an instrumented, modular insect arena for motion analysis and measuring ground reaction forces of small arthropods. Proceedings of Acoustics 2024

Regeler V., Boudinot, B.E., Wöhrl, T (preprint 2023) Go thou to the ant: A comparative biomechanical analysis of locomotion in Hymenoptera (Hexapoda). bioRxiv 2023.02.24.529971; https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.02.24.529971 

Wöhrl T, Richter A, Guo S, Reinhardt L, Nowotny, M Blickhan, R (2021) Comparative analysis of a geometric and an adhesive righting strategy against toppling in inclined hexapedal locomotion [DOIExternal link] [DataExternal link] [CodeExternal link]

Wöhrl, T (2019), "Risking rather tipping than sliding in traversing uneven habitats? Comparing adaptive locomotion strategies for two different ant species", Institute for Zoology and Evolutionary Research, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany

Guo S, Lin J, Wöhrl T and Liao M (2018), "A Neuro-Musculo-Skeletal Model for Insects With Data-driven Optimization", Scientific Reports., 2, 2018. Vol. 8(1), pp. 2129. [DOIExternal link] [PDFExternal link] [VideoExternal link]

Wöhrl T, Reinhardt L and Blickhan R (2017), "Propulsion in hexapod locomotion: how do desert ants traverse slopes?", Journal of Experimental Biology., 2, 2017. Vol. 220(9), pp. 1618-1625. [DOIExternal link] [PDFExternal link] [DataExternal link] [VideoExternal link]

Wöhrl, T (2016), "Ants walking on slopes", Motions Systems Perspectives Conference, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany