Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Many bees, butterflies, birds, bats and primates are known to forage on familiar plant resources by visiting them in a stable and repeatable order called "traplines". Here we report the existence of trapline foraging in wasps, the Japanese yellow hornets. We monitored the movement patterns of wild individually marked hornets collecting sucrose solution on four artificial flowers placed in their home range. After thirty consecutive foraging bouts, all the hornets had developed a repeatable flower visitation sequence. Using two different arrays of flowers, we also show that hornets consistently increased their foraging efficiency with experience. However, they did not always use the shortest path to visit all the flowers, often favoring movements between nearest-neighbour options rather than minimizing overall travel distance. Our study thus adds nectar-foraging wasps to the list of animals that exhibit trapline foraging, thereby significantly broadening the scope for comparative research in multi-destination route learning and memory.
Source: Animal Cognition
Institutions: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, Université de Toulouse, Centre de Biologie Intégrative de Toulouse, University of the Philippines Los Baños, Fukushima University, Agence de la transition écologique, Autorité de sûreté nucléaire et de radioprotection
Language: English
Subfield: Genetics
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,390
Award: G494178036
OpenAlex ID: W4409589923