Adverse social experience impacts social structure by modifying the behavior of individuals, but the relationship between an individual's behavioral state and its response to adversity is poorly understood. We leveraged naturally occurring division of labor in honey bees and studied the biological embedding of environmental threat using laboratory assays and automated behavioral tracking of whole colonies. Guard bees showed low intrinsic levels of sociability compared to foragers and nurse bees, but large increases in sociability following exposure to a threat. Threat experience also modified the expression of caregiving-related genes in a brain region called the mushroom bodies. These results demonstrate that the biological embedding of environmental experience depends on an individual's societal role and in turn impacts its future sociability.
Context-dependent influence of threat on honey bee social network dynamics and brain gene expression
Present address: Lewis Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540
Present address: Molecular and Integrative Biosciences, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802
- Award Group:
- Funder(s): National Institute of Health
- Award Id(s): R01GM117467
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- Accepted Manuscript 24 February 2022
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Ian M. Traniello, Adam R. Hamilton, Tim Gernat, Amy C. Cash-Ahmed, Gyan Harwood, Allyson M. Ray, Abigail Glavin, Jacob Torres, Nigel Goldenfeld, Gene E. Robinson; Context-dependent influence of threat on honey bee social network dynamics and brain gene expression. J Exp Biol 2022; jeb.243738. doi: https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.243738
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