Flower choice copying in bumblebees

Worden, Bradley D.; Papaj, Daniel R.

doi:10.1098/rsbl.2005.0368

Cited by 135 publications

(127 citation statements)

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“…Acoustic experience affected female responsiveness well after the completion of a full light cycle (over 16 hours), suggesting that acoustic effects persist beyond the previously recognized 'prior male' effects in other invertebrates ( Wagner et al 2001). Complex learning and memory capabilities are thoroughly documented in many insect groups, especially in the context of other behaviours such as foraging (Dukas 2004(Dukas , 2005Worden & Papaj 2005), and our results open the door to areas of future research investigating the behavioural basis of rapid evolution and the maintenance of genetic variation in traits under strong sexual selection. This work was funded by NSF grants to M.Z.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acoustic experience shapes female mate choice in field crickets

2008

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Female choice can drive the evolution of extravagant male traits. In invertebrates, the influence of prior social experience on female choice has only recently been considered. To better understand the evolutionary implications of experience-mediated plasticity in female choice, we investigated the effect of acoustic experience during rearing on female responsiveness to male song in the field cricket Teleogryllus oceanicus. Acoustic experience has unique biological relevance in this species: a morphological mutation has rendered over 90 per cent of males on the Hawaiian island of Kauai silent in fewer than 20 generations, impeding females' abilities to locate potential mates. Females reared in silent conditions mimicking Kauai were less discriminating of male calling song and more responsive to playbacks, compared with females that experienced song during rearing. Our results to our knowledge, are the first demonstration of longterm effects of acoustic experience in an arthropod, and suggest that female T. oceanicus may be able to compensate for the reduced availability of long-range male sexual signals by increasing their responsiveness to the few remaining signallers. Understanding the adaptive significance of experience-mediated plasticity in female choice provides insight into processes that facilitate rapid evolutionary change and shape sexual selection pressure in natural populations.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acoustic experience shapes female mate choice in field crickets

2008

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“…It is likely that this learning is strengthened due to social learning via copying behaviour, which has been observed in primates who learn to eat medicinal leaves by observation (Huffman et al, 2010), and in crickets learning from others to avoid predation (Coolen et al, 2005). Indeed, copying behaviour is very important for naive bees, which copy more experienced bees in order to choose certain flowers (Grüter et al, 2010;Kawaguchi et al, 2006;Leadbeater and Chittka, 2005;Worden and Papaj, 2005). Furthermore, infected bees demonstrate impaired learning of visual cues (Alghamdi et al, 2008;Gegear et al, 2006) and reduce their foraging activity after infection because of the immune challenge (Otterstatter et al, 2005).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social scent marks do not improve avoidance of parasites in foraging bumblebees

Fouks

Lattorff

2012

Journal of Experimental Biology

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SUMMARYForaging is a result of innate and acquired mechanisms, and is optimized in order to increase fitness. During foraging, an animal faces many threats, such as predation and infection. The uptake of parasites and diseases while foraging is common and an individual should be adapted to detect and avoid such threats, using cues from either the abiotic environment or the parasite. Social animals possess an additional cue to detect such contaminated food sources: information provided by conspecifics. Bumblebees avoid contaminated flowers, but the cues used by the bees to distinguish contamination remain unknown. Under controlled laboratory conditions, we tested the use of scent marks derived from other foragers in choosing between a contaminated (by Crithidia bombi) and an uncontaminated flower. As a positive control we tested the beeʼs choice between two flowers, one scented with geraniol and containing a highly rewarding sugar solution, and the other not scented and containing a poorer reward. The bees mainly chose the uncontaminated and the rewarding scented flowers. Scent marks did not increase the efficiency of the bumblebees in choosing the better flower. The bees from both experiments behaved similarly, showing that the main and most relevant cue used to choose the uncontaminated flower is the odour from the parasite itself. The adaptation of bumblebees to avoid flowers contaminated by C. bombi arose from the long-term host-parasite interaction between these species. This strong adaptation results in an innate behaviour of bees and a detection and aversion of the odour of contaminated flower nectar.Supplementary material available online at http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/216/2/285/DC1 Key words: Bombus terrestris, Crithidia bombi, host-parasite interaction, social cue, social immunity, social learning. THE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY 286 levels of social immunity, from the uptake of the parasite to its transmission to the next generation (Cremer et al., 2007). Social immunity may occur in the presence of a parasite (activated response) but also in the absence of parasites (prophylactic response) (Cremer et al., 2007;Richter et al., 2012).Bumblebees are parasitized by Crithidia bombi (Lipa and Triggiani, 1988) (Trypanosomatida), a well-adapted gut parasite of bumblebees (Schmid-Hempel, 2001). This parasite decreases drastically the chance for a future queen to found a new colony, and also the size and the efficiency of new colonies (Brown et al., 2003). According to the Red Queen hypothesis (Bell, 1982; Decaestecker et al., 2007), this long-term relationship leads to an arms race. Recently, Fouks and Lattorff (Fouks and Lattorff, 2011) discovered an avoidance behaviour in foraging bumblebees of flowers contaminated either by a specific parasite (C. bombi) or by a common microorganism (Escherichia coli: Bacteria).The combination of activated social immunity during foraging behaviour exhibited in bumblebees is of importance as parasites might be taken up on shared food patches (Durrer and ...

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“…Those conspecifics foraged on only one of two available flower colors, and when the observers were later permitted to forage alone, they "copied" the color preferences of the demonstrators (5,43,44). This type of learning initially appears conceptually opaque, because learning theory is based upon the fundamental concept of prediction error, which requires a difference between predicted and experienced outcomes (45).…”

Section: An Associative Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Insects not only learn about foraging skills, food preferences, brood hosts, and potential mates by responding to information provided inadvertently by others (4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11), but also transmit these behaviors further, such that they propagate through groups (8,12) and possibly even through wild populations (13). Some of these phenomena appear similar to socially learned behavior patterns that have been described in vertebrates (11,14) at least outside the context of imitation, and as such they are interesting extensions to the taxonomic distribution of social learning.…”

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confidence: 99%

A social insect perspective on the evolution of social learning mechanisms

Leadbeater

Dawson

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The social world offers a wealth of opportunities to learn from others, and across the animal kingdom individuals capitalize on those opportunities. Here, we explore the role of natural selection in shaping the processes that underlie social information use, using a suite of experiments on social insects as case studies. We illustrate how an associative framework can encompass complex, contextspecific social learning in the insect world and beyond, and based on the hypothesis that evolution acts to modify the associative process, suggest potential pathways by which social information use could evolve to become more efficient and effective. Social insects are distant relatives of vertebrate social learners, but the research we describe highlights routes by which natural selection could coopt similar cognitive raw material across the animal kingdom.social learning | associative learning | observational conditioning | social insects | Bombus

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Flower choice copying in bumblebees

Cited by 135 publications

References 18 publications

Acoustic experience shapes female mate choice in field crickets

Acoustic experience shapes female mate choice in field crickets

Social scent marks do not improve avoidance of parasites in foraging bumblebees

A social insect perspective on the evolution of social learning mechanisms

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