| Title: | Role of conspecifics and personal experience on behavioral avoidance of contaminated flowers by bumblebees |
| Author(s): | Fouks B; Robb EG; Lattorff HMG; |
| Address: | "Institut fur Biologie, Molekulare Okologie, Martin-Luther-Universitat Halle-Wittenberg Hoher Weg, Halle (Saale), Germany. Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES), Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. Microbes and Pathogens Biology, The Institute for Global Food Security, School of Biological Sciences, Queen's University Belfast, United Kingdom. International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), Nairobi, Kenya. German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Deutscher Platz, Leipzig, Germany" |
| ISSN/ISBN: | 1674-5507 (Print) 2396-9814 (Electronic) 1674-5507 (Linking) |
| Abstract: | "Pollinators use multiple cues whilst foraging including direct cues from flowers and indirect cues from other pollinators. The use of indirect social cues is common in social insects, such as honeybees and bumblebees, where a social environment facilitates the ability to use such cues. Bumblebees use cues to forage on flowers according to previous foraging experiences. Flowers are an essential food source for pollinators but also pose a high risk of parasite infection through the shared use of flowers leading to parasite spillover. Nevertheless, bumblebees have evolved behavioral defense mechanisms to limit parasite infection by avoiding contaminated flowers. Mechanisms underlying the avoidance of contaminated flowers by bumblebees are poorly understood. Bumblebees were recorded having the choice to forage on non-contaminated flowers and flowers contaminated by a trypan osome gut parasite, Crithidia bombi. The use of different treatments with presence or absence of conspecifics on both contaminated and non-contaminated flowers allowed to investigate the role of social visual cues on their pathogen avoidance behavior. Bumblebees are expected to use social visual cues to avoid contaminated flowers. Our study reveals that the presence of a conspecific on flowers either contaminated or not does not help bumblebee foragers avoiding contaminated flowers. Nevertheless, bumblebees whereas gaining experience tend to avoid their conspecific when placed on contaminated flower and copy it when on the non-contaminated flower. Our experiment suggests a detrimental impact of floral scent on disease avoidance behavior" |
| Keywords: | Host-parasite interactions behavioral immunity copying behavior inadvertent social information pollinators social learning; |
| Notes: | "PubMed-not-MEDLINEFouks, Bertrand Robb, Emily G Lattorff, H Michael G eng England 2019/08/16 Curr Zool. 2019 Aug; 65(4):447-455. doi: 10.1093/cz/zoy099. Epub 2018 Dec 19" |
