Learning from an exotic social wasp

MARIANA LOZADA; PAOLA D´ADAMO

Huerta Grande, Cordoba

Conferencia; Conferencia Satélite Sociedad Argentina Neurociencias; 2013

SAN

I will present findings on behavioral plasticity in the wasp Vespula germanica. We investigated cognitive processes related to its foraging behavior, analyzing the effects of past experience on wasp response to change. This species makes consecutive flights between an undepleted resource and the nest. In our experiments, individual wasps collect food from a feeder located in a certain position in relation to a colored array. We found that when food was removed after wasp departure, on its return, wasps continued searching for the resource for a length of time which depended on the number of previous feeding experiences. We also found that, when food was displaced to a distance of 60 cm and an empty dish was placed at the original feeding site, on its next visit, wasps visited the empty feeder without noticing the nearby presence of food, even with only one previous experience. These findings indicate how previous experience seems to condition perception, delaying the detection of more rewarding contexts. What seems paradoxical is why returning foragers do not discover the available meat, but search over a site which no longer offers food, despite the fact that odour cues have great saliency for this species. We also found that when the colour of the array was changed when the food was displaced, on its next visit, wasps detected the novel food site more quickly than if contextual conditions remained unaltered. In sum, our studies show how this wasp deals with uncertainty.