Individual differences in learning and biogenic amine levels influence the behavioural division between foraging honeybee scouts and recruits.

摘要: Animals must effectively balance the time they spend exploring environment for new resources and exploiting them. One way that social animals accomplish this is by allocating these two tasks to different individuals. In honeybees, foraging divided between scouts, which tend explore landscape novel resources, recruits, exploit resources. Exploring variation in cognitive physiological mechanisms of behaviour will provide a deeper understanding how division labour regulated insect societies. Here, we uncover honeybee may be shaped predispositions performance latent inhibition (LI), form non-associative learning individuals learn ignore familiar information. We compared LI scouts hypothesizing differences would correlate with behaviour. Scouts seek out encounter many odours while locating recruits continuously forage from same resource, even as its quality degrades. found show stronger than possibly reflecting their need discriminate quality. also have significantly elevated tyramine recruits. Furthermore, after associative odour training, diminished octopamine brains scouts. These results suggest individual shapes phenotypic behavioural types foragers. turn important consequences colonies interact environment. Uncovering proximate influence crucial ecological context societies evolve.