Abstract
To cope with environmental variability, animals should gather and use information to reduce uncertainty. In insect parasitoids, associative learning has been widely documented in the context of host foraging. However, despite its potential adaptive value, the insect food searching strategy and cues used to search are poorly understood. In this study, we examined the ability of hymenopteran Venturia canescens females to associate food to a visual cue. To broaden the scope of our results, experiments were performed with both arrhenotokous (sexual) and thelytokous (asexual) individuals. The wasps showed innate attraction for yellow and orange stimuli when presented versus blue stimuli. When trained to associate a food reward with one of the attractive colours (orange), they significantly moved from a distance towards the colour previously associated with food. The choice of the innately preferred colour (yellow) was not modified by associative learning. In the context of food foraging, this study is the first to show associative learning using visual stimuli in a parasitoid and active choice of this colour. This ability gives new insights concerning potential food sources for V. canescens in the field, since flowers are sugar sources, which emit colour signals.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to I. Amat for comments on a first version of the manuscript. Andra Thiel and three anonymous reviewers have commented on an earlier version and provided most helpful advice on how to improve our work. We also thank A. Heizmann and F. Debias for keeping the wasp culture and L. Humblot for his assistance in drawing the figures. This work was supported by a grant from Ecole Doctorale “E2M2” of the University Lyon 1 allocated to P. Lucchetta, two grants allocated to E. Desouhant (BQR 2006 Univ. Lyon 1; ANR “jeunes chercheuses, jeunes chercheurs” (no. JCJC06_138616) and by the CNRS Behavioral Ecology Research Group GDR 2155. Experiments of this study comply with the current laws of the country (France) in which they were performed.
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Appendix
Appendix
Colour locus in the colour space simulated for hymenopterans according to the Chittka (1992) model with spectral sensitivity functions of the standard photoreceptors for trichromatic Hymenoptera (adapted from Peitsch et al. 1992)
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Lucchetta, P., Bernstein, C., Théry, M. et al. Foraging and associative learning of visual signals in a parasitic wasp. Anim Cogn 11, 525–533 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-008-0144-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-008-0144-5