Abstract
Research on social learning has centered around vertebrates, but evidence is accumulating that small-brained, non-social arthropods also learn from others. Social learning can lead to social inheritance when socially acquired behaviors are transmitted to subsequent generations. Using oviposition site selection, a critical behavior for most arthropods, as an example, we first highlight the complementarities between social and classical genetic inheritance. We then discuss the relevance of studying social learning and transmission in non-social arthropods and document known cases in the literature, including examples of social learning from con- and hetero-specifics. We further highlight under which conditions social learning can be adaptive or not. We conclude that non-social arthropods and the study of oviposition behavior offer unparalleled opportunities to unravel the importance of social learning and inheritance for animal evolution.
Highlights
The emergence and spread of novel behaviors through social learning, or “learning from others”, has been documented in a wide variety of animals, mainly in social vertebrates [1,2,3,4,5]
Social inheritance entails the perception of behaviors performed by others that are subsequently taken over and spread throughout a population and subsequent generations [6,7,8,9]
While learning of foraging, mating, host finding and other behaviors have been discussed elsewhere [30,31,32,33,34], here we focus on the social transmission of oviposition site selection
Summary
The emergence and spread of novel behaviors through social learning, or “learning from others”, has been documented in a wide variety of animals, mainly in social vertebrates [1,2,3,4,5]. There is, to the best of our knowledge, no evidence yet for epigenetic transmission of spatial localization and memory of suitable resources, as depicted in our example of Figure 2, nor for other behaviors typically related to oviposition site selection in arthropods, such as transmission of preference for novel specific host plant species across generations [68,72]. Social learning can increase local adaptation of individuals relying on socially acquired information by increasing their chance of finding a resource, or reducing the time or energetic cost these individuals need for finding and remembering the location of a resource, such as host plants for oviposition in a new suitable habitat (i.e., oviposition site selection; Figure 2A,B). Quantifying the adaptive value of social learning is of central importance (as depicted in steps A and B of Figure 2), whether socially acquired traits are transmitted over longer evolutionary times, or not
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