SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submission Preview
Ants hold grudges, study suggests
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-ants-grudges.html [phys.org]
A team of evolutionary biologists has demonstrated that ants learn from experience. Led by Dr. Volker Nehring, research associate in the Evolutionary Biology and Animal Ecology group at the University of Freiburg, and doctoral student Mélanie Bey, the team repeatedly confronted ants with competitors from another nest. The test ants remembered the negative experiences they had during these encounters.
When they encountered ants from a nest they had previously experienced as aggressive, they behaved more aggressively toward them than toward ants from nests unknown to them. Ants that encountered members of a nest from which they had previously only encountered passive ants were less aggressive. The results have been published in the journal Current Biology.
Ants use odors to distinguish between members of their own nest and those from other nests. Each nest has its own specific scent. Previous studies have already shown that ants behave aggressively towards their nearest neighbors in particular.
They are especially likely to open their mandibles and bite, or spray acid and kill their competitors. They are less likely to carry out such aggressive maneuvers against nests that are further away from their own. Until now, it was unclear why this is the case. Nehring's team has now discovered that ants remember the smell of attackers. This is why they are more aggressive when confronted with competitors from nests they are familiar with.
The scientists conducted an experiment in two phases. In the first phase, ants gained various experiences: One group encountered ants from their own nest, the second group encountered aggressive ants from a rival nest A, and the third group encountered aggressive ants from rival nest B. A total of five encounters took place on consecutive days, with each encounter lasting one minute.
In the subsequent test phase, the researchers examined how the ants from the different groups behaved when they encountered competitors from nest A. The ants that had already been confronted by conspecifics from this nest in the first phase behaved significantly more aggressively than those from the other two groups.
