Transcriptomic responses to location learning by honeybee dancers are partly mirrored in the brains of dance-followers

Fabio Manfredini* (Corresponding Author), Yannick Wurm, Seirian Sumner, Ellouise Leadbeater

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)
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Abstract

The waggle dances of honeybees are a strikingly complex form of animal communication that underlie the collective foraging behaviour of colonies. The mechanisms by which bees assess the locations of forage sites that they have visited for representation on the dancefloor are now well-understood, but few studies have considered the remarkable backward translation of such information into flight vectors by dance-followers. Here, we explore whether the gene expression patterns that are induced through individual learning about foraging locations are mirrored when bees learn about those same locations from their nest-mates. We first confirmed that the mushroom bodies of honeybee dancers show a specific transcriptomic response to learning about distance, and then showed that approximately 5% of those genes were also differentially expressed by bees that follow dances for the same foraging sites, but had never visited them. A subset of these genes were also differentially expressed when we manipulated distance perception through an optic flow paradigm, and responses to learning about target direction were also in part mirrored in the brains of dance followers. Our findings show a molecular footprint of the transfer of learnt information from one animal to another through this extraordinary communication system, highlighting the dynamic role of the genome in mediating even very short-term behavioural changes.
Original languageEnglish
Article number20232274
Number of pages10
JournalProceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Volume290
Issue number2013
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 20 Dec 2023

Bibliographical note

Open Access via the Royal Society agreement

This research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant no. 638873 to E.L.). This funding also supported F.M. for the whole duration of the project.

Data Availability Statement

All transcriptomic data are deposited in the NCBI SRA database under three separate BioProjects: PRJNA760896 for real-distance dancers, PRJNA762185 for real-distance followers and PRJNA756776 for the samples that were part of the tunnel simulation of foraging distance; this set also including data that were part of another publication [56]. All these data are publicly available.

Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6960928.

Keywords

  • Animal Communication
  • Animals
  • Bees/genetics
  • Brain
  • Gene Expression Profiling
  • Learning
  • Mushroom Bodies

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