Natural aversive learning in Tetramorium ants reveals ability to form a generalizable memory of predators’ pit traps

Hollis, Karen L.; McNew, Kelsey L.; Sosa, Talisa; Harrsch, Felicia A.; Nowbahari, Elise

doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2017.03.003

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Naturally, the present results do not mean that sanddwelling ants are helpless in terms of antlion larva capture. Ants can minimize the risk of predation by avoiding antlion aggregation zones to some extent (Gotelli 1996;Morrison 2004;Hollis et al 2017), which is their first "line of defense" against antlions. Additionally, earlier results obtained in rescue behavior investigations utilizing antlions (see, e.g., Miler 2016) are not invalidated by the present findings since rescue is a general behavioral category and major factors contributing to its occurrence (e.g., life expectancy) may very well be highly context independent.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ants Co-Occurring with Predatory Antlions Show Unsuccessful Rescue Behavior towards Captured Nestmates

et al. 2020

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The interaction of antlions and ants is postulated to be a predator-prey interaction in which the involved parties coevolve. Here, we investigated two issues of potential significance in terms of antlions and ants imposing selective pressures on one another. First, we determined whether trap-building antlions and sanddwelling ants closely co-occurred in an area inhabited by both. In the field, we found that ants were the main potential prey items in artificial traps placed inside aggregation zones of antlions and that Formica cinerea workers comprised the majority of these ants. Second, we checked whether rescue behavior, a type of prosocial behavior displayed by F. cinerea workers and performed towards nestmates captured by antlions, reduced the hunting success of the latter. In the laboratory, we found that rescue attempts were very rarely successful. Overall, caution must be used when considering the coevolution of antlions and ants. Clearly, even though these two organisms can closely co-occur, the rescue behavior of ants seems to be unrelated to the predatory threat from antlions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ants Co-Occurring with Predatory Antlions Show Unsuccessful Rescue Behavior towards Captured Nestmates

et al. 2020

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“…Interestingly, prey can generalize their acquired predator recognition to similar but novel species, and continuously update their recognition templates 62, 63. Animals also learn to avoid locations associated with predation: ants are able to form a generalized memory of their predators’ pit traps after escaping a single time [64], and mice show risk assessment and escape behaviours when exploring an arena in which they previously encountered threats 19, 65.…”

Section: Threat Detectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Control of Escape Behaviour

Evans¹,

Stempel²,

Vale³

et al. 2019

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

173

153

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When faced with potential predators, animals instinctively decide whether there is a threat they should escape from, and also when, how, and where to take evasive action. While escape is often viewed in classical ethology as an action that is released upon presentation of specific stimuli, successful and adaptive escape behaviour relies on integrating information from sensory systems, stored knowledge, and internal states. From a neuroscience perspective, escape is an incredibly rich model that provides opportunities for investigating processes such as perceptual and value-based decision-making, or action selection, in an ethological setting. We review recent research from laboratory and field studies that explore, at the behavioural and mechanistic levels, how elements from multiple information streams are integrated to generate flexible escape behaviour.

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“…Studies addressing the role of social structure in nervous system trait evolution often propose that social complexity, generally measured by colony size, will be negatively correlated with individual worker behavioral complexity (Anderson and McShea, 2001;Gronenberg and Riveros, 2009;O'Donnell et al, 2015) and hypothesize that relative brain investment, particularly in brain regions associated with more complex behaviors such as multi-modal learning and memory, will decrease with increasing colony size (Riveros et al, 2012;O'Donnell et al, 2015;Kamhi et al, 2016). However, individual workers of social species often show behavioral and cognitive skills comparable to solitary relatives (Gruter et al, 2011;Pasquier and Grüter, 2016;Hollis et al, 2017;Yilmaz et al, 2017), and comparisons seeking to link colony size with changes in brain structure may be complicated by confounding variables such as habitat differences or phylogenetic distance (Kamhi et al, 2016;Godfrey and Gronenberg, 2019b). Furthermore, complex collective behaviors may emerge from expanded communication systems or require relatively small changes in neural circuitry (Lihoreau et al, 2012;Bouchebti and Arganda, 2020) without changes to individual behavioral complexity (Jeanson et al, 2012;Feinerman and Korman, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Olfactory System Morphology Suggests Colony Size Drives Trait Evolution in Odorous Ants (Formicidae: Dolichoderinae)

et al. 2021

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In social insects colony fitness is determined in part by individual worker phenotypes. Across ant species, colony size varies greatly and is thought to affect worker trait variation in both proximate and ultimate ways. Little is known about the relationship between colony size and worker trait evolution, but hypotheses addressing the role of social structure in brain evolution suggest workers of small-colony species may have larger brains or larger brain regions necessary for complex behaviors. In previous work on odorous ants (Formicidae: Dolichoderinae) we found no correlation between colony size and these brain properties, but found that relative antennal lobe size scaled negatively with colony size. Therefore, we now test whether sensory systems scale with colony size, with particular attention to olfactory components thought to be involved in nestmate recognition. Across three species of odorous ants, Forelius mccooki, Dorymyrmex insanus, and D. bicolor, which overlap in habitat and foraging ecology but vary in colony size, we compare olfactory sensory structures, comparing those thought to be involved in nestmate recognition. We use the visual system, a sensory modality not as important in social communication in ants, as a control comparison. We find that body size scaling largely explains differences in eye size, antennal length, antennal sensilla density, and total number of olfactory glomeruli across these species. However, sensilla basiconica and olfactory glomeruli in the T6 cluster of the antennal lobe, structures known to be involved in nestmate recognition, do not follow body size scaling observed for other structures. Instead, we find evidence from the closely related Dorymyrmex species that the larger colony species, D. bicolor, invests more in structures implicated in nestmate recognition. To test for functional consequences, we compare nestmate and non-nestmate interactions between these two species and find D. bicolor pairs of either type engage in more interactions than D. insaus pairs. Thus, we do not find evidence supporting a universal pattern of sensory system scaling associated with changes in colony size, but hypothesize that observed differences in the olfactory components in two closely related Dorymyrmex species are evidence of a link between colony size and sensory trait evolution.

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Natural aversive learning in Tetramorium ants reveals ability to form a generalizable memory of predators’ pit traps

Cited by 15 publications

References 47 publications

Ants Co-Occurring with Predatory Antlions Show Unsuccessful Rescue Behavior towards Captured Nestmates

Ants Co-Occurring with Predatory Antlions Show Unsuccessful Rescue Behavior towards Captured Nestmates

Cognitive Control of Escape Behaviour

Olfactory System Morphology Suggests Colony Size Drives Trait Evolution in Odorous Ants (Formicidae: Dolichoderinae)

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