Early learning by predatory mites in foraging contexts

Learning, behavioral change by experience, is a ubiquitous phenomenon in animals. Learning may affect every major life activity such as foraging, reproduction or social interactions. Learning is generally considered a behavioral optimization process and assumed to help animals to adjust their behaviors to varying environments. The proposed project focuses on learning in the very early stages of life by plant-inhabiting predatory mites in foraging contexts. These predatory mites are important natural enemies of herbivorous mites and insects, used in biological control around the world. The principal project ideas are based on own recent findings that early in life, including in the prenatal phase, the mites are well able to learn the features of a given prey. Relatively brief experiences made soon after hatching in the larval stage persist through juvenile development, including three molting events, and lead to profound and consistent behavioral changes after reaching adulthood. The proposed project addresses three major intertwined issues. Issue (1) pursues the questions which learning mechanisms (associative and non-associative) the mites are able to use early in life, which cues they learn and how different learning mechanisms affect adult foraging behaviors. Issue (2) seeks to unravel the ultimate costs and benefits of early learning, i.e. how early learning affects fitness-related life-history traits and whether learning and improved foraging on a given prey comes at the expense of being less flexible in exploiting other prey and in processing novel information later in life. Issue (3) aims at determining the population level consequences of early learning. How can early learning by predatory mites be exploited in biological control, how do early experiences with a given prey affect the predators` impact on target and non-target herbivorous mites and insects. It should be possible to create phenotypic lines of the predators experienced with a given prey or its cues, which should then perform better with this prey than nave predators do. The experimental work of the proposed project consists primarily of manipulative experiments at the individual and population levels. The spatial scale of the experiments ranges from small scale cages and arenas to whole plants, and plant groups. The core research will be accomplished by two PhD students and a MSc student. In an ideal case, this trans-disciplinary project shows how the knowledge gained in fundamental research can be translated into applied aspects. It breaks new scientific ground by linking comprehensive research on learning mechanisms, sensitive periods, memory persistence and adaptive significance, the cascading effects of learning to the population level and biological control. The findings of this proposal should have relevance beyond the model animals used, i.e. predatory mites, and considerably improve our understanding of early learning by arthropods in general.

No additional funding sources recorded.