The scent of mixtures: rules of odour processing in ants

Scientific Reports
Margot PerezPatrizia d'Ettorre

Abstract

Natural odours are complex blends of numerous components. Understanding how animals perceive odour mixtures is central to multiple disciplines. Here we focused on carpenter ants, which rely on odours in various behavioural contexts. We studied overshadowing, a phenomenon that occurs when animals having learnt a binary mixture respond less to one component than to the other, and less than when this component was learnt alone. Ants were trained individually with alcohols and aldehydes varying in carbon-chain length, either as single odours or binary mixtures. They were then tested with the mixture and the components. Overshadowing resulted from the interaction between chain length and functional group: alcohols overshadowed aldehydes, and longer chain lengths overshadowed shorter ones; yet, combinations of these factors could cancel each other and suppress overshadowing. Our results show how ants treat binary olfactory mixtures and set the basis for predictive analyses of odour perception in insects.

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Citations

Apr 23, 2016·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·David ZwickerMichael P Brenner
Nov 4, 2017·The Journal of Experimental Biology·Lucie DesmedtPatrizia d'Ettorre
Aug 22, 2018·The Journal of Experimental Biology·Hugo BaglanFernando J Guerrieri
Mar 2, 2018·Current Zoology·Eve UdinoPatrizia d'Ettorre
Dec 13, 2019·Frontiers in Physiology·Mario Pannunzi, Thomas Nowotny

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