Principles of Animal Behavior, Fourth Edition by Lee Alan Dugatkin

Author:Lee Alan Dugatkin [Dugatkin, Lee Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: SCI000000 Science / General
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 11.23. Birth weight and foraging-related learning. Bees that were heavier on emergence from brood cells were better learners when tested on a foraging task at three weeks old. Reprinted with permission of Elsevier. © 2012. (From Scheiner, 2012)

Learning and Foraging

While the studies described so far often involve animals learning something about their foraging environment, they were not explicitly designed as studies on foraging and learning per se (see Box 11.4 and Box 11.5).

Box 11.4. SCIENCE AT WORK

What is the research question? How does developmental variation in honeybees map onto subsequent variation in their ability to learn about food sources?

Why is this an important question? The proximate underpinnings of variation in the ability to learn are of interest to both behavioral ecologists and psychologists.

What approach was taken to address the research question? Honeybees were weighed on emergence from brood cells and immediately tested on their response to a sucrose solution. These same bees were then tested on a foraging-related learning task when they three weeks old.

What was discovered? A positive correlation between birth weight and foraging-related learning at age three weeks was found. Variation in learning among the bees was also positively correlated with how quickly an individual responded to the sucrose solution after emergence.

What do the results mean? The underlying proximate factors that affect learning while foraging can be studied experimentally. This is will help shed light on why we see individual variation in learning.

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