Associative learning helps ants to hold grudges.

Authors

Ken Cheng

Published in

Journal of experimental psychology. Animal learning and cognition. Sep 22, 2025. Epub Sep 22, 2025.

Abstract

Comments on an article by Mélanie Bey et al. (2025). A recent study by Bey et al. suggests that one species, the black garden ant Lasius niger, also relies on classical conditioning in fighting foreign conspecifics. The study sheds more light on the role of classical conditioning in the lives of ants. In the study from Volker Nehring's group in Freiburg, Germany, Bey et al. first documented in the field that within a distance of 30 m around a focal nest, focal ants were more aggressive to non-nestmates from nearby nests than to those from nests farther away. The first control could be called a unconditioned stimuli (US)-only condition. The trained ants were exposed to an ant from an unfamiliar nest whose ants the trained ants had never encountered before. If US exposure alone led to some sensitization in the form of more aggressive fighting, irrespective of the conditioned stimuli (CS)-US association, the trained focal ants should be aggressive from the first encounter with an ant from an unknown nest. Exposure to an unknown non-nestmate, as the authors called this group of ants, elicited no more aggression than did exposure to a nestmate. This is a successful and illuminating control. A less successful control was what could be called a CS-only condition. The authors wanted to expose focal ants to members of one nest that were not aggressive in fighting. The scientists pacified the non-nestmates by ablating their antennae, which contain the chemosensors for smelling other ants. Not sensing a strange ant in the focal ants, these deantennated stimulus ants remained non-aggressive. After multiple encounters with non-aggressive ants, when the focal ants were then tested with an intact known non-nestmate from that same nest-and these stimulus ants did fight-the test ants showed only low levels of aggression. The problem with this control is that the antennae of hymenopterans are not only sensory receptors of smell and taste, but are also packed with chemicals, hydrocarbons often said to display the olfactory signature of a nest. The nasty-neighbor study of Bey et al. shows a case of aversive conditioning. One open question about the nasty-neighbor effect in black garden ants is the functional one: Is being nasty to neighbors beneficial? Perhaps aggressiveness toward neighbors keeps rivals from even approaching one another, saving time and energy. Perhaps it is important for territorial defense. In sum, ants have been shown to learn many things. The study by Bey et al. suggests strongly that associative learning in the form of classical conditioning also aids black garden ants to better fight stranger ants. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:
40991812
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 25 Sep 2025.

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