Abstract
While foraging, social insects encounter a dynamic array of food resources of varying quality and profitability. Because food acquisition influences colony growth and fitness, natural selection can be expected to favor colonies that allocate their overall foraging effort so as to maximize their intake of high-quality nutrients. Social wasps lack recruitment communication, but previous studies of vespine wasps have shown that olfactory cues influence foraging decisions. Odors associated with food brought into the nest by successful foragers prompt naive foragers to leave the nest and search for the source of those odors. Left unanswered, however, is the question of whether naive foragers take food quality into account in making their decisions about whether or not to search. In this study, two different concentrations of sucrose solutions, scented differently, were inserted directly into each of three Vespula germanica nests. At a feeder away from the nest, arriving foragers were given a choice between two 1.5 M sucrose solutions with the same scents as those in the nest. We show that wasps chose higher-quality resources in the field using information in the form of intranidal food-associated odor cues. By this simple mechanism, the colony can bias the allocation of its foraging effort toward higher-quality resources in the environment.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Mark Allington, Tom Dettinger, and Matt Moore for constructing the nest boxes and huts used for housing the colonies in this experiment. Jeffrey and Denise Baylis graciously allowed us to house our colonies on their property. We also thank the Covington family, Ken Langenecker and Donna Waddell, and Brian and Stacey Carroll for contacting us about nests in their lawns. Sainath Suryanarayanan, Teresa Schueller, and members of the Lundi Munch behavioral group at UW–Madison provided insightful comments on this manuscript. This research was supported by UW–Madison Hatch (USDA) project no. 4961 to RLJ and by the UW–Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
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Taylor, B.J., Schalk, D.R. & Jeanne, R.L. Yellowjackets use nest-based cues to differentially exploit higher-quality resources. Naturwissenschaften 97, 1041–1046 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-010-0724-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-010-0724-5