Olfactory plasticity in the generalist pollinator Apis mellifera

LOCATELLI, F; GASCUE, F.; PÍREZ, N.

Mendoza

Congreso; X Congreso Argentino de Entomología; 2018

Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias de la Universidad de Mendoza

Animals process and perceive environmentalinformation in flexible ways. Some changes in perception are sustained andinvolve learning and memory processes while others occur quickly and are only transient.In this framework, sensory adaptation is defined as the phenomenon by which thesensitivity to a stimulus decreases after a sustained exposure to it. Thisphenomenon is characterized by a rapid loss of sensitivity and full recoverywithin a few seconds after the stimulus disappears. Curiously, this phenomenonhas been mostly described and studied by focusing on what the animal fails toperceive, but not on the consequences that it has on the perception of thestimuli for which the animal has not experienced adaptation. In this project westudy the enriching effect that sensory adaptation has on the ability ofanimals to detect stimuli to which it has not been adapted and that wouldremain overshadowed by dominant stimuli under normal conditions. We use honeybees Apis mellífera that have a highcapacity to learn and recognize odors. By doing behavioral experiments we showthat this phenomenon reduces appetitive learning of adapted stimuli while itfavors learning of minor components that would normally stay occluded. By doingcalcium imaging experiments, we determined that activation patterns that encodemixtures in the antennal lobe are drastically altered after sensory adaptation,in a way that favors the representation of stimuli that are present atsub-threshold concentrations. The results obtained so far emphasize that sensoryadaptation is a fundamental mechanism to increase the sensitivity of the animaland not to reduce it.