Humans aren’t the only species that find it hard to forgive and forget, a new study suggests that ants can learn from past experiences. New research has shown that ants remember their encounters with competitors from another nest and treat every member of that nest accordingly.
The results, published in the journal Current Biology, found that ants remembered the negative experiences they had during repeat encounters with competitors. When test ants encountered ants from a nest they had previously deemed hostile, they behaved more aggressively towards them.
Ants that encountered members of a nest from which they had previously only encountered friendly (passive) ants were less aggressive. “We often have the idea that insects function like pre-programmed robots,” said lead researcher Dr Volker Nehring, research associate in the Evolutionary Biology and Animal Ecology group in a statement.
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“Our study provides new evidence that, on the contrary, ants also learn from their experiences and can hold a grudge.”
The team of evolutionary biologists from the University of Freiburg placed ants into one-minute-long meet-and-greet scenarios with either their own nest, a hostile rival ‘nest A’ or another hostile ‘nest B’ In a second phase, the researchers examined how the ants from the different groups behaved when they encountered competitors from ‘nest A’.
They repeated the experiment, distinguishing between encounters with aggressive and passive ants. Ants primarily rely on their fine-tuned olfactory sense (sense of smell) to differentiate between the scent of members of their own family and ants from rival nests.
Nehring and his team next plan to investigate whether ants also adapt their olfactory receptors to their experiences.