Abstract
On the basis of what is known about the biology and the cognitive abilities of the workers of the ant Myrmica sabuleti studied at a collective level, we wondered if these ants could associate sighted cues with time periods of the day. Working on four colonies and using four different cues, we showed that, trained to one kind of cue from 8 to 19 o’clock and, at the same time, to another kind of cue from 20 o’clock to 7 o’clock the next day, the ants responded far more to the first kind of cue at 16 o’clock and far more to the second kind of cue at 4 o’clock. Thus, they not only learned the conditioned stimuli but also associated them with the time of day during which the conditionings were performed. Results of previous experiments on quantitative sequences rule out the possibility that the present findings could be explained by an aversion to less recently learned cues. Associating environmental cues to particular times of the day should allow ants to best adapt their behavior to their habitat.
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Acknowledgements
We sincerely thank the anonymous referees who considerably helped us improving our manuscript. We are particularly grateful to the reviewer who put us on the path to statistical analyses more appropriate to our data.
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Conceptualization and methodology: MCC; resources: RC; laboratory maintenance and work: MCC; data processing: RC; analysis of relevant literature: RC; writing—original draft: MCC, writing—review and editing: RC. Both authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
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This research was conducted without financial support and any conflict of interest. No approval of research ethic was required, because laboratory maintenance and experimental work were done with unregulated invertebrate species.
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Cammaerts, MC., Cammaerts, R. Association between visual cues and time of day in an ant. J Ethol 40, 223–232 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10164-022-00751-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10164-022-00751-4