Research carried out by scientists at the University of Freiburg, Germany, revealed that ants use associative learning to recognize enemies.
Just like humans, animals also experience emotions such as empathy, love, sadness and joy. And you can also save rancor.
The new study carried out by the German university revealed that ants They can learn from experiences and hold grudges when faced with competitors from another nest with whom they have had negative experiences.
“We have the idea that insects work like pre-programmed robots. Our study provides new evidence that, contrary to what we thought, ants also learn from their experiences and they can hold a grudge,” said expert Volker Nehring, quoted by .
The team pitted ants against rivals from another nest and concluded that the animals remembered negative experiences that they had during previous encounters.
During the experiment, the ants acted more aggressively when encountering the non-companion colony they had previously battled, but were less aggressive towards ants from a non-companion colony they had not yet interbred with.
As for their nestmates, they were not aggressive.
These insects use odors to distinguish members of their own nest from unfamiliar ones, so this study suggests that ants have learned to associate aggression with the specific smell of the cologne.
In the future, scientists want to investigate whether – and to what extent – ants adapt their olfactory receptors to their experiences.
The was recently published in Current Biology.
