IFIBYNE   05513
INSTITUTO DE FISIOLOGIA, BIOLOGIA MOLECULAR Y NEUROCIENCIAS
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
artículos
Título:
Food information acquired socially overrides individual food assessment in ants
Autor/es:
ROXANA JOSENS; ALINA GIACOMETTI; JIMENA LOIS-MILEVICICH; ANALÍA MATTIACCI; ROXANA JOSENS; ALINA GIACOMETTI; JIMENA LOIS-MILEVICICH; ANALÍA MATTIACCI
Revista:
BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY AND SOCIOBIOLOGY
Editorial:
SPRINGER
Referencias:
Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2016 vol. 70 p. 2127 - 2138
ISSN:
0340-5443
Resumen:
Social insects rely on sophisticated communication channelsand on individual decision making to achieve efficient forag-ing behavior. Through social interactions, individuals can ac-quire information inadvertently provided by a nestmate suchas in trophallaxis. During this mouth-to-mouth food ex-change, food receivers can perceive the odor of the food de-livered by the donor and thus associate this odor with a foodreward. Through individual experience, workers are able toperceive characteristic information of the food they havefound and to evaluate food quality. Here, we determinedwhich information, social or individual, is prioritized by thecarpenter ants Camponotus mus in a foraging context. Weexposed receiver ants to a deterrent and harmful food withthe same odor they had previously learned in the social con-text of trophallaxis. We determined on which information in-dividual ants based their decision to forage, whether on theirindividual evaluation of food quality or on the previouslyacquired social information. We show that the odor experi-enced in a trophallactic contact overrides individual food as-sessment to the extent that ants collect the deterrent food whenthe odor coincided with that experienced in a social context. Ifants were exposed individually during a similar time to a foodwith the odor and afterwards, they were confronted with the same odor paired with the deterrent substance, and they rejected the deterrent food, contrary to what occurred when the odor was experienced in a social context. These results show that olfactory appetitive experiences in the social con- text play a fundamental role for subsequent individual forag- ing decisions. Individuals can acquire information byinteracting directly with the environment or through social interactions with other individuals. Individual and social in- formation may induce informational conflicts so that it is cru- cial to determine when it is worth ignoring one sort of infor- mation in favor of the other. Social insects are usefulmodels to address this question: individuals evaluate and learn about their environment and rely on sophisticated communication systems. Here, we show that carpenter ants receiving social instructions, leading them to forage on a toxic food, overcome their natural rejection of this food, despite its noxious effects. Social instructions are, therefore, powerful enough to induce the consumption of food that would be otherwise rejected on the basis of the ants? individual evaluation. Thus, although eusociality seems to favor sacrificing individual assessments in favor of social information, the resulting ?social obedience? may not always be adaptive.