Meeting Abstract
Observations of floral constancy in bumblebees imply that foraging bumblebees are capable recognizing target flowers from a noisy background of non-target flowers. Indeed, making a target flower more recognizable by increasing its variability from background flowers increases bumblebees’ tendency to exhibit floral constancy. Floral recognition is driven by sensory cues such as shape, color, and/ or floral odor. Bumblebees have a demonstrated ability to associate odor cues with a profitable resource: using odor to locate food in a maze, and successfully conditioning to odor cues in Pavlovian experimental paradigms. Our prior work showed that olfactory pollution has a negative effect on bumblebee foraging behavior in a laboratory study that utilized two representative agrochemical odors. This small stimulus set indicated that olfactory pollution can impact behavior, but did not allow us to determine if the structural relationship of the contaminating odor signal relative to the original associative scent drove the observed behavioral changes. This begets the question, does the level of structural similarity between the associative (A) and contaminating (B) odors impact the likelihood of disrupting an olfactory association? Current experiments train bumblebees to associate a floral odor blend with a sugar reward, then offer foragers a choice between an uncontaminated feeder (scented with A), and a contaminated feeder (scented with AB). Using RFID, we are able to track individual foragers’ behavioral responses to odor contamination. In addition, GCMS characterization of associative and contaminating odor-blends allows us to look for correlations between behavioral responses and the structure of polluting odors. Preliminary analysis indicates that effects of contaminating odors are not universal.
