Food Information acquired socially overrides individual food assessment in ants

JOSENS, R.; MATTIACCI, A.; LOIS-MILEVICICH, J.; GIACOMETTI, A.

BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY AND SOCIOBIOLOGY

SPRINGER

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2016 vol. 70 p. 2127 - 2138

0340-5443

Social insects rely on sophisticated communication channels and on individual decision making to achieve efficient foraging behavior. Through social interactions individuals can acquire information inadvertently provided by a nestmate such as in trophallaxis. During this mouth-to-mouth food exchange, food receivers can perceive the odor of the food delivered by the donor, and thus associate this odor with a food reward. Through individual experience, workers are able to perceive characteristic information of the food they find and evaluate food quality. Here we determined which information, social or individual, is prioritized by the carpenter ants Camponotus mus in a foraging context. We exposed receiver ants to a deterrent and harmful food with the same odor they had previously learned in the social context of trophallaxis. We determined on which information individual ants based their decision to forage, whether on their individual evaluation of food quality or on the previously acquired social information. We show that the odor experienced in a trophallactic contact overrides individual food assessment to the extent that ants collect the deterrent food when the odor coincided with that experienced in a social context. If ants were exposed individually during a similar time to a food with the odor and afterwards, they were confronted with the same odor paired with the deterrent substance, 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 context play a fundamental role for subsequent individual foraging decisions.