Extinction of Innate Floral Preferences in the Generalist Solitary Pollinator Eristalis tenax.

ABSTRACT: Innate behaviours allow solitary animals to complete essential tasks in the absence of social learning. However, we know little about the degree to which ecologically relevant innate preferences can change, and a complete extinction of innate preferences has rarely been shown. The hoverfly Eristalis tenax, a solitary generalist pollinator, is an ideal model for studying innate behaviour in a naturalistic context because its survival depends on the innate ability to identify flowers across many habitats, which could necessitate both learning and unlearning floral objects. Innate behaviour in E. tenax has previously been considered inalterable, but we hypothesised that E. tenax could modulate their innate behaviour after training to a multimodal object derived from chemical and visual cues p

SUBMITTER: Rajan D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12391161 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature