Abstract
Social-information use has generated great interest lately and has
been shown to have important implications for the ecology and evolution
of species. Learning about predators or predation risk from others
may provide low-cost life-saving information and would be expected
to have adaptive payoffs in any species where conspecifics are observable
and behave differently under predation risk. Yet, social learning
and social-information use in general have been largely restricted
to vertebrates. Here, we show that crickets adapt their predator-avoidance
behavior after having observed the behavior of knowledgeable others
and maintain these behavioral changes lastingly after demonstrators
are gone. These results point toward social learning, a contingency
never shown before in noncolonial insects. We show that these long-lasting
changes cannot instead be attributed to long re-emergence times,
long-lasting effects of alarm pheromones, or residual odor cues.
Our findings imply that social learning is likely much more phylogenetically
widespread than currently acknowledged and that reliance on social
information is determined by ecological rather than taxonomic constrains,
and they question the generally held assumption that social learning
is restricted to large-brained animals assumed to possess superior
cognitive abilities.
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