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Project

Use of social information and cultural transmission in bumblebees: an approach using robotic flower arrays

Social learning and copying others underlie in large part the cumulative cultural evolution and technological progress that is unique to our species. Over the last decades, however, examples of social learning and even long-lasting cultural traditions have been discovered throughout the animal kingdom, not just in vertebrates but even in insects. Bumblebees have emerged as a particularly attractive model system in this field, having been shown to be capable to learn even abstract and quite complex tasks through social learning. In the present project I will use bumblebees to address some major outstanding questions in the field of social learning and cultural transmission in insects. Specifically, I will 1) study how social information modulates the exploration of alternative foraging options, i.e., the exploration-exploitation tradeoff, and 2) test if relatively simple learning mechanisms enable them to display seemingly complex cultural transmission biases, such as disproportionally copying either the most common or the most rewarding strategy (conformist & payoff-biased transmission). To test these hypotheses, I will make use of innovative robotic flower arrays, which will enable me to individually track all flower visits and allow me to document social learning and cultural diffusion in unprecedented detail.

Date:1 Dec 2021 →  Today
Keywords:Bumblebee, Foraging behaviour, Cultural transmission, Social learning
Disciplines:Behavioural ecology, Invertebrate biology
Project type:PhD project