Abstract
Recognition of human face images by the free flying wasp Vespula vulgaris
Highlights
The capacity of animals to remotely identify other individuals using visual cues can convey important fitness benefits by avoiding conflicts, or strengthening social bonds (Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2002; Tibbetts & Dale, 2007)
We assessed the capacity of Vespula vulgaris wasps to learn images of human faces from a standard test (Warrington, 1996) used to quantify face recognition in human subjects
The wasps in a free flying condition were able to learn to approach a target stimulus to collect a reward and to avoid a similar distractor associated with a distasteful substance following an appetite-aversive differential conditioning procedure known to improve visual learning in other hymenoptera (Avarguès-Weber, de Brito Sanchez, et al, 2010; Chittka et al, 2003; Rodríguez-Gironés et al, 2013)
Summary
Experiments were conducted at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany in late summer when Vespula vulgaris wasps could be found visiting gravity feeders filled with sucrose solution (12% (vol/vol)). The wasps feeding at the gravity feeder were visually tracked to find their nest that was established about 35 m away from our test site. The clypeus region of each individual Vespula vulgaris wasp was isolated with Photoshop selection tools, converted to achromatic images by equalizing the output of the red, green and blue color channels and image segmentation was conducted using threshold values to create binary images representing either the 'black' or 'yellow' components of the wasp clypeus (Figure 1A). The respective surface areas were converted to percentage area coverage following the methodology of Sheehan and Tibbetts (2010)
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