Dipartimento di Biologia, Università di Firenze, Firenze, Italy.
Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research, University College London, London, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2020 Jul 6;375(1802):20190468. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0468. Epub 2020 May 18.
Social recognition represents the foundation of social living. To what extent social recognition is hard-wired by early-life experience or flexible and influenced by social context of later life stages is a crucial question in animal behaviour studies. Social insects have represented classic models to investigate the subject, and the acknowledged idea is that relevant information to create the referent template for nest-mate recognition (NMR) is usually acquired during an early sensitive period in adult life. Experimental evidence, however, highlighted that other processes may also be at work in creating the template and that such a template may be updated during adult life according to social requirements. However, currently, we lack an ad hoc experiment testing the alternative hypotheses at the basis of NMR ontogeny in social insects. Thus, to investigate the mechanisms underlying the ontogeny of NMR in wasps, a model genus in recognition studies, and their different role in determining recognition abilities, we subjected workers to different olfactory experiences in different phases of their life before inserting them into the social environment of a novel colony and testing them in recognition bioassays. Our results show that workers develop their NMR abilities based on their social context rather than through pre-imaginal and early learning or self-referencing. Our study demonstrates that the social context represents the major component shaping recognition abilities in a social wasp, therefore shedding new light on the ontogeny of recognition in paper wasps and prompting the reader to rethink about the traditional knowledge at the basis of the recognition in social insects. This article is part of the theme issue 'Signal detection theory in recognition systems: from evolving models to experimental tests'.
社会认同代表了社会生活的基础。社会认同在多大程度上是由早期生活经历所决定的，或者是灵活的并受到后期生活阶段的社会环境影响的，这是动物行为研究中的一个关键问题。社会昆虫一直是研究这一主题的经典模型，人们普遍认为，与巢穴伙伴识别（NMR）相关的信息通常是在成年早期的一个敏感时期获得的。然而，实验证据表明，其他过程也可能在模板的创建中起作用，并且该模板可能会根据社会需求在成年期进行更新。然而，目前，我们缺乏专门的实验来测试社会昆虫 NMR 个体发生的替代假设。因此，为了研究在识别研究的典型属——黄蜂中，NMR 个体发生的机制及其在决定识别能力方面的不同作用，我们在将工蜂插入新群体的社会环境并在识别生物测定中对其进行测试之前，让它们在不同的生命阶段经历不同的嗅觉体验。我们的结果表明，工蜂根据其社会环境而不是通过预孵化和早期学习或自我参照来发展其 NMR 能力。我们的研究表明，社会环境是塑造黄蜂识别能力的主要因素，因此为纸黄蜂的识别个体发生提供了新的视角，并促使读者重新思考社会昆虫识别基础上的传统知识。本文是主题为“识别系统中的信号检测理论：从进化模型到实验检验”的一部分。
