Are ants botanists?: Ant associative learning of plant volatiles

Abstract

Ants are important members of most terrestrial ecosystems, and often forage in plant canopies where they occasionally participate in mutualisms with either the plants, or aphids that live on the plants. To participate in these mutualisms, the ants must first find them, and it is not clear how ants do this while foraging in the field. It is known that while ants forage in plant canopies they encounter many plant volatiles. There is also some laboratory evidence of associative learning in ants. This leads to the hypothesis that the ants may be learning to recognize the scents of plants that host resources, and preferentially forage on similar smelling plants. In this study we explore whether ants exhibit an association between the scent of a plant, and a honey reward, and whether this is dependent on the local plant density, and thus scent density, in the surrounding area. The two plants used in the study were Helianthella quinquenervis. an ant mutualist, and Ligusticum porteri a host for aphids, another ant mutualist, allowing us to better understand how this relationship may affect the plants as well. We found that ant foraging may be affected by both the surrounding density of resources, and associative learning. This is important as it brings us closer to understanding how ants interact with their environments across trophic levels, as well as how they and their mutualists may be affected by changes in the environment.

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