How behavioral plasticity enables foraging under changing environmental conditions in the social wasp Vespula germanica (Fabricius, 1793) (Hymenoptera: Vespidae)

SABRINA MOREYRA; LOZADA, MARIANA

INSECT SCIENCE

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2021

1672-9609

When Vespula germanica (Fab.) (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) social wasps findan abundant resource in anthropized environments they make several trips backand forth to the nest to feed their larvae. To accomplish this, they learnlandmarks and contextual cues related to the food location in order to returnto the exact place where the resource was found. In the present study, wesought to explore wasps? behavioral plasticity while foraging on resourceswhose location and composition changes after one collecting visit. We evaluatedwhether several contextual modifications, such as food displacement andreplacement, contribute to finding the resource more rapidly than if no changeswere introduced. Wasps? searching behavior was analyzed under four differentconditions: 1) food displacement 60 cm away from the original site as well asreplacement of the resource for a novel type in the previously learned location;2) food displacement only; 3) food replacement only and 4) food remaining inthe same location on both visits. The results showed that wasps found andcollected the resource faster when more changes were introduced on thefollowing visit. That is, when returning foragers discovered severalmodifications on both the location and the kind of resource, they collectedfood more rapidly from the displaced dish than when only one type ofenvironmental change was performed. These findings illustrate the behavioralplasticity of V. germanica whileforaging on abundant resources, which might contribute to the understanding ofits invasive success in colonized environments.