Experience can modify how animals respond to relevant stimuli from their environment, for example, through associative learning. In particular, odour stimuli play a central role in foraging by influencing decision making. Numerous studies have shown that odours can acquire relevance for an animal by becoming associated with food after appetitive experience. Therefore, studying to what extent learning can modulate the behavioural response to olfactory stimuli is essential to improve our understanding about the role of experience in food exploitation in nature. Here, we evaluated whether foraging experience can modulate the response of Vespula germanica, a food generalist and opportunistic eusocial wasp, towards an aversive odour. Through field experiments, we evaluated the response of naive and experienced wasps towards an aversive odour under different scenarios, to also examine how these changes affect foraging decisions. Both naive wasps and wasps that had foraging experience in the absence of the aversive odour were not attracted to the odour alone and avoided meat sources paired with this cue. However, wasps that had foraging experience with the aversive odour showed an opposite behavioural pattern; they preferred meat sources with the aversive odour and were equally attracted to this odour and the meat source. The behavioural repertoire (i.e. approaches, landings and search behaviour) elicited by the aversive odour after experience with it indicates that change in the response was due to associative learning, leading the odour which was initially repellent, to become attractive. Interestingly, the change in the aversive odour's valence occurred after one collecting experience and three to five visits promoted long-term memory of the odour. In conclusion, our results show that spontaneous responses to odours can be modulated by experience and provide new insights about learning and memory abilities of social wasps in relation to olfactory cues.

中文翻译：

---

觅食经验调节社会黄蜂对厌恶气味线索的反应

经验可以改变动物对来自环境的相关刺激的反应，例如，通过联想学习。特别是，气味刺激通过影响决策在觅食中发挥着核心作用。大量研究表明，气味可以通过在食欲体验后与食物联系起来而与动物相关。因此，研究学习在多大程度上可以调节对嗅觉刺激的行为反应，对于提高我们对经验在自然界食物开发中的作用的理解至关重要。在这里，我们评估了觅食经验是否可以调节德国胡蜂（一种食物通才和机会主义的真社会黄蜂）对厌恶气味的反应。通过田间试验，我们评估了幼稚和经验丰富的黄蜂在不同情况下对厌恶气味的反应，还研究了这些变化如何影响觅食决策。幼稚的黄蜂和在没有厌恶气味的情况下有觅食经验的黄蜂都不会被单独的气味所吸引，并避免与这种提示配对的肉类来源。然而，具有厌恶气味觅食经验的黄蜂表现出相反的行为模式。他们更喜欢带有厌恶气味的肉源，并且同样被这种气味和肉源所吸引。体验后由厌恶气味引起的行为库（即接近、着陆和搜索行为）表明反应的变化是由于联想学习，导致最初令人厌恶的气味变得有吸引力。有趣的是，厌恶气味效价的变化发生在一次收集经验和三到五次访问后，促进了气味的长期记忆。总之，我们的结果表明，对气味的自发反应可以通过经验进行调节，并提供有关社会黄蜂与嗅觉线索相关的学习和记忆能力的新见解。