CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Vespula germanica (F.) (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) is a highly invasive social wasp that exhibits diverse foraging strategies. This species presents various cognitive mechanisms, which could be related to this diversity in foraging behaviour as well as to the great variety of ecological environments it inhabits. We analysed the learning abilities of these wasps while relocating a food source, and evaluated whether V. germanica foraging wasps are capable of extracting visual pattern information, despite changes in the elements constituting the pattern. Foraging wasps were trained to associate two different line orientation patterns with their respective food locations. Their response to a novel configuration that maintained the orientation of one of the learned patterns but differed in other aspects (e.g. width of lines) was then evaluated. It was found that V. germanica wasps have a great ability to discriminate between oblique and vertical patterns, associating a certain orientation pattern with a particular food location. Moreover, these wasps can extract visual regularities from an oriented pattern, choosing the appropriate food location associated with the pattern despite the novelty of the structural details of the new stimulus.