CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Experience can modifyhow animals respond to relevant stimuli from their environment, for example,through associative learning. In particular, odour stimuli play a central rolein foraging by influencing decision-making. Numerous studies showed that odourscan acquire relevance for the animal by becoming associated with food afterappetitive experience. Therefore, studying to what extent learning can modulatethe behavioural response to olfactory stimuli is essential to improve ourunderstanding about the role of experience in food exploitation in nature.Here, we evaluated whether foraging experience can modulate the response of Vespula germanica, a food generalist andopportunistic eusocial wasp, towards an aversive odour. Through fieldexperiments, we evaluated the response of naïve and experienced wasps towardsthe odour under different scenarios, to also examine how these changes affectforaging decisions. Both naïve wasps and wasps that had foraging experience inthe absence of the odour were not attracted to the odour alone and avoided meatsources paired with this cue. However, wasps that had foraging experience withthe odour showed an opposite behavioural pattern; they preferred meat sourceswith the odour and were equally attracted to the odours as to the meat. Thebehavioural repertoire elicited by the odour (i.e., approaches, landings andsearch behaviour) after experience with it indicates that change in theresponse was due to associative learning, leading the odour to becomeattractive. Interestingly, the change in the odour´s valence occurred after onecollecting experience and three to five visits promoted long-term memory of theodour. Inconclusion, our results show that spontaneous responses to odours can bemodulated by experience and provide new insightsabout learning and memory abilities of social wasps in relation to olfactorycues.

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