Sucrose responsiveness, learning success, and task specialization in ants

Abstract

Social insects possess remarkable learning capabilities, which are crucial for their ecological success. They also exhibit interindividual differences in responsiveness to environmental stimuli, which underlie task specialization and division of labor. Here we investigated for the first time the relationships between sucrose responsiveness, behavioral specialization, and appetitive olfactory learning in ants, including reproductive castes. We show that castes of the ant Camponotus aethiops differ in their responsiveness to sucrose and in their learning success in olfactory conditioning experiments in which sucrose is used as reward. Olfactory learning was better in foragers than in nurses, in agreement with their higher sucrose responsiveness. Interindividual variation in stimulus responsiveness and in learning may be, therefore, a crucial factor for division of labor in social insects.