Can antlions discriminate?: testing the limits of associative learning in antlion Myrmeleon immaculatus.

Abstract

Despite the abundance of literature on associative learning in insects, the ability of insects to learn to discriminate between different stimuli through associative learning remains largely unstudied. Antlion Myrmeleon immaculatus larvae construct steep conical pitfall traps in the sand that they use to capture prey. Previous studies have show that M. immaculatus larvae can learn to associate vibrational stimuli with food through conditioning. In this study, we attempt to replicate these results and determine whether M. immaculatus larvae can learn to discriminate between different vibrational stimuli. We failed to demonstrate any associative learning capacity in our larvae, hypothesizing that this failure is due to our experimental design. I discuss recommendations for future studies on discriminatory learning in antlions.