Paper Published in Proceedings of the National academies of science!

titled: 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.

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