Abstract

Background: In highly structured societies, individuals behave flexibly and cooperatively in order to achieve a particular group-level outcome. However, even in social species, environmental inputs can have long lasting effects on individual behavior, and variable experiences can even result in consistent individual differences and constrained behavioral flexibility. Despite the fact that such constraints on behavior could have implications for behavioral optimization at the social group level, few studies have explored how social experiences accumulate over time, and the mechanistic basis of these effects. In the current study, I evaluate how sequential social experiences affect individual and group level aggressive phenotypes, and individual brain gene expression, in the highly social honey bee (Apis mellifera). To do this, I combine a whole colony chronic predator disturbance treatment with a lab-based manipulation of social group composition.

Results: Compared to the undisturbed control, chronically disturbed individuals show lower aggression levels overall, but also enhanced behavioral flexibility in the second, lab-based social context. Disturbed bees display aggression levels that decline with increasing numbers of more aggressive, undisturbed group members. However, group level aggressive phenotypes are similar regardless of the behavioral tendencies of the individuals that make up the group, suggesting a combination of underlying behavioral tendency and negative social feedback influences the aggressive behaviors displayed, particularly in the case of disturbed individuals. An analysis of brain gene expression showed that aggression related biomarker genes reflect an individual’s disturbance history, but not subsequent social group experience or behavioral outcomes.

Conclusions: In highly social animals with collective behavioral phenotypes, social context may mask underlying variation in individual behavioral tendencies. Moreover, gene expression patterns may reflect behavioral tendency, while behavioral outcomes are further regulated by social cues perceived in real-time.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-3-2017

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Frontiers in Zoology, v. 14, 16, p. 1-10.

© The Author(s). 2017

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12983-017-0199-8

Funding Information

Work was funded by the National Science Foundation IOS-1256705 (Gene Robinson and Nathan Price).

Related Content

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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