Erik T. Frank (@etf1989.bsky.social)

Associative learning of non-nestmate cues improves enemy recognition in ants Bey et al. show that ants that are attacked by other ants learn the recognition cues of their attackers. This leads to increased aggression against all ants from the attacker’s colony that share the same cues. Ants thus associatively learn the recognition cues of their attackers to form an “enemy template” that improves nestmate recognition. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(24)01595-1