Individual Learning Phenotypes Drive Collective Behavior

Variation in individual cognition affects how animals learn about and communicate information to others. We provide evidence that differences in how individual honey bees learn influences the collective foraging dynamics of a colony. By creating colonies of distinct learning phenotypes, we evaluated how bees make foraging choices in the field. Colonies containing individuals that learn to ignore unimportant information preferred familiar food locations; however, colonies of individuals that are unable to ignore familiar information visit novel and familiar feeders equally. Colonies with a 50/50 mix of these phenotypes prefer familiar food locations because individuals who learn the familiar location recruit nestmates by dancing more intensely. Our results reveal that cognitive variation among individuals nonlinearly shapes collective behavioral outcomes.

个体认知差异会影响动物的信息习得能力与同伴间的信息传递模式。本研究证实，蜜蜂个体的学习模式差异会对蜂群的集体觅食动态产生影响。我们通过构建具有差异化学习表型（learning phenotypes）的蜂群，对野外环境中蜜蜂的觅食选择行为进行了评估。由能够学会忽略无关信息的个体组成的蜂群，会优先选择熟悉的食物位点；而由无法忽略熟悉信息的个体构成的蜂群，则会对新型与熟悉的饲喂器给予同等频次的造访。当蜂群中两种表型个体各占50%时，仍会优先选择熟悉的食物位点——这是因为能够习得熟悉位点信息的个体，会通过更剧烈的舞蹈行为招募巢内同伴。本研究结果表明，个体间的认知变异会以非线性方式塑造群体的行为结果。