Galante Henrique, Czaczkes Tomer J
Department of Zoology and Evolutionary Biology, Animal Comparative Economics Laboratory, University of Regensburg, 93053 Regensburg, Germany.
Curr Zool. 2023 Feb 7;70(1):87-97. doi: 10.1093/cz/zoad001. eCollection 2024 Feb.
Argentine ants are one of the most damaging invasive alien species worldwide. Enhancing or disrupting cognitive abilities, such as learning, has the potential to improve management efforts, for example by increasing preference for a bait, or improving ants' ability to learn its characteristics or location. Nectar-feeding insects are often the victims of psychoactive manipulation, with plants lacing their nectar with secondary metabolites such as alkaloids and non-protein amino acids which often alter learning, foraging, or recruitment. However, the effect of neuroactive chemicals has seldomly been explored in ants. Here, we test the effects of seven potential neuroactive chemicals-two alkaloids: caffeine and nicotine; two biogenic amines: dopamine and octopamine, and three nonprotein amino acids: β-alanine, GABA and taurine-on the cognitive abilities of invasive using bifurcation mazes. Our results confirm that these ants are strong associative learners, requiring as little as one experience to develop an association. However, we show no short-term effect of any of the chemicals tested on spatial learning, and in addition no effect of caffeine on short-term olfactory learning. This lack of effect is surprising, given the extensive reports of the tested chemicals affecting learning and foraging in bees. This mismatch could be due to the heavy bias towards bees in the literature, a positive result publication bias, or differences in methodology.
阿根廷蚁是全球最具危害性的入侵外来物种之一。增强或干扰认知能力，如学习能力，有可能改善管理措施，例如通过增加对诱饵的偏好，或提高蚂蚁了解其特征或位置的能力。以花蜜为食的昆虫常常是精神活性操纵的受害者，植物会在花蜜中掺入生物碱和非蛋白质氨基酸等次生代谢物，这些物质常常会改变昆虫的学习、觅食或招募行为。然而，神经活性化学物质对蚂蚁的影响却很少被研究。在此，我们使用分叉迷宫测试了七种潜在神经活性化学物质对入侵蚂蚁认知能力的影响，这七种物质分别是两种生物碱：咖啡因和尼古丁；两种生物胺：多巴胺和章鱼胺；以及三种非蛋白质氨基酸：β-丙氨酸、γ-氨基丁酸和牛磺酸。我们的结果证实，这些蚂蚁是强大的联想学习者，只需一次经历就能建立联系。然而，我们发现所测试的任何一种化学物质对空间学习都没有短期影响，此外，咖啡因对短期嗅觉学习也没有影响。鉴于有大量关于所测试化学物质影响蜜蜂学习和觅食的报道，这种缺乏影响的情况令人惊讶。这种不匹配可能是由于文献中对蜜蜂的严重偏向、阳性结果的发表偏向或方法上的差异造成的。
