How context modification can favor the release of past experience in Vespula germanica wasps, enabling the detection of a novel food site

PAOLA D´ADAMO; MARIANA LOZADA

JOURNAL OF INSECT BEHAVIOR

SPRINGER/PLENUM PUBLISHERS

Lugar: New York; Año: 2014

0892-7553

Vespula germanica wasps typically, make consecutive trips between an undepleted food source and their nest. Hence, relocating a rewarded location is a recurrent activity during a wasp?s lifetime. While foraging, wasps continue searching over a previously rewarded location even when food is no longer available. Moreover, when food is displaced to a location nearby, wasps still visit the previously rewarded location. We aimed to study how the modification of the local context would affect the discovery of the novel food site. By displacing food and changing the local context after wasps had learned a certain task, we evaluated whether wasps found a new food location more rapidly than if contextual conditions remained unaltered. We found that wasps detect the novel food site more quickly when contextual conditions were changed in relation to those previously learned. Furthermore, we observed that the more rewarding experiences wasps had at the initial site, the greater the time taken to find the new feeder location. We conclude that past experience has less impact on decision-making when context is modified.