TY - JOUR
T1 - Brain composition and olfactory learning in honey bees
AU - Gronenberg, Wulfila
AU - Couvillon, Margaret J.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman for her advice regarding Africanized honey bees and for providing the bees, Andre Riveros for advice and help with the conditioning experiments and statistical analysis, him and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions on the manuscript, and Elizabeth Collier, Jennifer Heller, Allie Moriarty and Alexandra Stepczynski for help with sectioning and tracing the brains. This work was supported by grants from NSF (IOB 0519483 to W.G.) and from NIH [Postdoctoral Excellence in Research and Teaching (PERT) fellowship] to M.J.C.
PY - 2010/3
Y1 - 2010/3
N2 - Correlations between brain or brain component size and behavioral measures are frequently studied by comparing different animal species, which sometimes introduces variables that complicate interpretation in terms of brain function. Here, we have analyzed the brain composition of honey bees (Apis mellifera) that have been individually tested in an olfactory learning paradigm. We found that the total brain size correlated with the bees' learning performance. Among different brain components, only the mushroom body, a structure known to be involved in learning and memory, showed a positive correlation with learning performance. In contrast, visual neuropils were relatively smaller in bees that performed better in the olfactory learning task, suggesting modality-specific behavioral specialization of individual bees. This idea is also supported by inter-individual differences in brain composition. Some slight yet statistically significant differences in the brain composition of European and Africanized honey bees are reported. Larger bees had larger brains, and by comparing brains of different sizes, we report isometric correlations for all brain components except for a small structure, the central body.
AB - Correlations between brain or brain component size and behavioral measures are frequently studied by comparing different animal species, which sometimes introduces variables that complicate interpretation in terms of brain function. Here, we have analyzed the brain composition of honey bees (Apis mellifera) that have been individually tested in an olfactory learning paradigm. We found that the total brain size correlated with the bees' learning performance. Among different brain components, only the mushroom body, a structure known to be involved in learning and memory, showed a positive correlation with learning performance. In contrast, visual neuropils were relatively smaller in bees that performed better in the olfactory learning task, suggesting modality-specific behavioral specialization of individual bees. This idea is also supported by inter-individual differences in brain composition. Some slight yet statistically significant differences in the brain composition of European and Africanized honey bees are reported. Larger bees had larger brains, and by comparing brains of different sizes, we report isometric correlations for all brain components except for a small structure, the central body.
KW - Africanized bees
KW - Brain size
KW - Mushroom body
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U2 - 10.1016/j.nlm.2010.01.001
DO - 10.1016/j.nlm.2010.01.001
M3 - Article
C2 - 20060918
AN - SCOPUS:77950690923
SN - 1074-7427
VL - 93
SP - 435
EP - 443
JO - Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
JF - Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
IS - 3
ER -