Abstract
Only recently have researchers studied the ability of ants to learn and remember individual heterospecific odors. Cataglyphis cursor adults have the capacity to learn these odors, but the duration of their memory and the factors that affect its formation remain unknown. We used a habituation/discrimination paradigm to study some of these issues. C. cursor adult workers were familiarized to an anesthetized Camponotus aethiops on four successive encounters. Then they were either isolated or placed with 20 nestmates for a certain length of time before undergoing a discrimination test that consisted of reintroducing the familiar C. aethiops, as well as introducing an unknown member of the same colony. The results showed that adult C. cursor ants can retain in memory a complex individual odor for at least 30 min, as well as differentiate it from the odor of another closely related individual. However, when ants were replaced in a rich social background between the habituation and the discrimination trials, we did not observe a significant discrimination between the known and unknown C. aethiops ants. Our study shows, for the first time, the existence of long-term memory for individual odors in mature ant workers.
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We are grateful to A. Lenoir, P. Gouat, and R. Fénéron for helpful discussion and suggestions; J.-L. Durand for helping in statistics analysis; K. Hollis and three anonymous referees for comments; M. C. Malherbe for rearing the ants; and L. Baltenneck for revising the first version of this article in English. E.F. is now affiliated with UMR CNRS 5558-LBBE, Université Claude Bernard-Lyon 1.
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Foubert, E., Nowbahari, E. Memory span for heterospecific individuals’ odors in an ant, Cataglyphis cursor . Learning & Behavior 36, 319–326 (2008). https://doi.org/10.3758/LB.36.4.319
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/LB.36.4.319