Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
Curr Biol. 2020 Aug 3;30(15):3007-3010.e2. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.05.053. Epub 2020 Jun 25.
Many animals minimize the costs of conflict by using social eavesdropping to learn about the fighting ability of potential rivals before they interact. Learning about individual conspecifics via social eavesdropping allows individuals to assess potential opponents without personal risk. However, keeping track of a network of individually differentiated social relationships is thought to be cognitively challenging. Here, we test how Polistes fuscatus nest-founding queens use social eavesdropping to assess individual rivals. Bystanders watched conspecifics fight through a clear partition. Then, bystanders were allowed to interact with fighters. Bystander behavior toward fighters was strongly influenced by the observed fight; bystanders were less aggressive toward fighters that were seen to initiate more and receive less aggression. Control trials allow us to reject alternative explanations for the link between observed aggression and bystander behavior, including priming or winner/loser effects. Therefore, P. fuscatus wasps observe and remember a complex network of social interactions between individual conspecifics rather than only paying attention to individuals they interact with directly. Wasps have an impressive capacity to learn, remember, and make social deductions about individuals. These results indicate that insects can have surprisingly complex social lives involving a network of individually differentiated social relationships.
许多动物通过社交偷听来最小化冲突的成本，即在与潜在对手互动之前，了解其战斗能力。通过社交偷听了解同种个体可以让个体在不承担个人风险的情况下评估潜在对手。然而，跟踪一个个体分化的社交关系网络被认为是具有认知挑战性的。在这里，我们测试了 Polistes fuscatus 筑巢蜂王如何通过社交偷听来评估个体对手。旁观者通过透明隔板观看同种个体的战斗。然后，旁观者被允许与战斗者互动。旁观者对战斗者的行为受到观察到的战斗的强烈影响；旁观者对被观察到发起更多攻击和收到更少攻击的战斗者的攻击性较弱。对照试验允许我们拒绝观察到的攻击与旁观者行为之间的联系的替代解释，包括启动或胜负效应。因此，P. fuscatus 黄蜂观察和记住了一个复杂的个体间社交互动网络，而不仅仅是关注它们直接与之互动的个体。黄蜂具有令人印象深刻的学习、记忆和对个体进行社交推断的能力。这些结果表明，昆虫的社交生活可能非常复杂，涉及到一个个体分化的社交关系网络。
