Abstract

Social complexity influences learning and other cognitive behaviors, but for insects, this influence is not well understood. Delayed rejection is an aversive learning behavior previously studied exclusively in leafcutting ant species, the most socially complex of the fungus-gardening ants. Fungus-gardening ants are unique in that they do not directly consume the material they forage, using it instead as substrate to cultivate a symbiotic fungus on which the ants are obligately dependent. Here, I attempt to induce delayed rejection in several fungus-gardening ant species that exhibit a range of social complexity, then compare the characteristics of delayed rejection behavior among species. In a blinded experiment conducted over five weeks with five species of fungus gardening ants (four nonleafcutting species and one leafcutting species), I presented ants with a readily foraged substrate adulterated with fungicide to determine a) if, like leafcutters, nonleafcutting fungus-gardening ants will learn to avoid a previously accepted substrate after it becomes unsuitable for the fungus, and b) how characteristics of this learning behavior differ between species. A generalized linear mixed model was constructed to model these observations. My results demonstrate that nonleafcutting fungus-gardening ants learn to reduce foraging of unsuitable substrate, and faster learning speed appears to roughly correlate with greater social complexity.

Date of publication

2025

Document Type

Thesis

Language

english

Persistent identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10950/4871

Committee members

Dr. Katrin Kellner, Dr. Jon Seal, Dr. Ryan Shartau

Degree

Masters of Science in Biology

Download

Share

COinS