SOCIAL INFORMATION USE IN SOCIAL INSECTS
Abstract
Social learning plays a valuable role in the lives of many animal taxa, sometimes
allowing individuals to bypass the costs of personal exploration. The ubiquity of this
behaviour may arise from the fact that learning from others is often underpinned by
simple learning processes that also enable individuals to learn asocially. Insects have
proven to be particularly valuable models for investigating parsimonious hypotheses
with regards to social learning processes, due to their small brain sizes and the
prevalence of social information use in their life histories. In this thesis, I use social
insects to further investigate the mechanisms underlying more complex social
learning behaviours and explore the circumstances under which social information
use manifests.
In the first chapter, I investigate the proximate mechanisms underlying social
learning and demonstrate that even seemingly complex social learning behaviours
can arise through simple associative learning processes. In Chapter two, I investigate
whether bees are more predisposed to learning from conspecific cues and discover
that social information is learnt to a greater extent than information originating from
non-social sources. In Chapter four, I demonstrate that classical conditioning also
underpins learning from evolved social signals in honeybees. Finally, I investigate
whether social information is used adaptively by bumblebees: Chapter three
demonstrates that joining behaviour in free-flying bees is contingent upon whether
flowers are familiar or not, and in Chapter six, I show that when social information is
costly to acquire, bees are more likely to rely on social information to make foraging
decisions.
Taken as a whole, my findings suggest that bees may be specially adapted for
receiving social information, but the ability to learn from others arises through
general associative learning mechanisms.
Authors
Dawson, Erika HCollections
- Theses [3831]