, 2005). However, if bees have no previous experience with these scent marks, they show no avoidance of flowers with such marks (Leadbeater & Chittka, 2011) and in fact, if a scent mark is coupled with a reward, as opposed to the absence of a reward, bees will seek out flowers with scent marks (Saleh & Chittka, 2006). The dance language of honeybees, where successful foragers indicate to nest mates the distance and direction of a useful food source, is perhaps one of the most remarkable cases of social learning in the animal

Metformin clinical trial kingdom. ‘Recruits’ attend the figure 8-shaped dance routines by following the dancer in close contact, and subsequently decode the information from the dances and apply them in spatial and temporal removal from the act of picking it up, when flying to the indicated food source. A study on heterospecific social learning between two different species of honeybees, Apis mellifera and Apis cerana, revealed that selleck chemicals the interpretation of the dance by recruits is less behaviourally hard-wired than originally thought (Su et al., 2008). These two species differ in their distance code so that the same food source is indicated subtly differently by dancers of the two species. When placed together

in the same hive, however, A. cerana can learn to decode the dance ‘dialect’ of A. mellifera, presumably by a form of trial-and-error learning. They must first notice that

their initially erroneous reading of the dances leads them to a reward-less location. When a subsequent search takes them to the rewarded site, a recalibration of their reading of the distance code apparently takes place, so that they subsequently read the ‘foreign dialect’ correctly. The adaptive interpretation of heterospecific cues in foraging decisions is not limited to pollinators. South African Augrabies flat lizards often feed on energetically rich fig tree fruits and can travel considerable distances to find a fruiting tree. In this context, being able to access remote information about the ripeness of fruits is crucial. Whiting & Greeff (1999) showed that lizards can use birds’ activity in the trees as a cue Ergoloid of fruit availability or ripeness (Fig. 2b). Furthermore, the lizards are attracted by experimentally manipulated bird congregations in trees as opposed to other fig trees containing only empty cages (Fig. 2b). Again, this attraction to heterospecific birds most likely results from simple Pavlovian conditioning. The lizards may have formed a simple association between the rewarding fruits (unconditioned stimulus) and the presence of the flocking birds (conditioned stimulus), thus explaining why the presence of the birds alone, without the fruiting trees, is enough to attract the lizards (Whiting & Greeff, 1999; Fig. 2b).