Ameisen erinnern sich an aggressive Rivalen und passen deren Verhalten an, indem sie bei Konfliktbegegnungen Lernfähigkeit und Gedächtnis beweisen | „Unsere Studie liefert neue Beweise dafür, dass Ameisen im Gegenteil auch aus ihren Erfahrungen lernen und einen Groll hegen können.“

From the article: Ants learn from experience. This has been demonstrated by a team of evolutionary biologists from the University of Freiburg, led by Dr Volker Nehring, research associate in the Evolutionary Biology and Animal Ecology group, and doctoral student Mélanie Bey. The researchers repeatedly confronted ants with competitors from another nest. The test ants remembered the negative experiences they had during these encounters: when they encountered ants from a nest they had previously experienced as aggressive, they behaved more aggressively towards them than towards ants from nests unknown to them. Ants that encountered members of a nest from which they had previously only encountered passive ants were less aggressive. The biologists published their results in the journal Current [Biology](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.11.054).

The scientists conducted an experiment in two phases. In the first phase, ants gained various experiences: one group encountered ants from their own nest, the second group encountered aggressive ants from a rival nest A, and the third group encountered aggressive ants from rival nest B. A total of five encounters took place on consecutive days, with each encounter lasting one minute.

In the subsequent test phase, the researchers examined how the ants from the different groups behaved when they encountered competitors from nest A. The ants that had already been confronted with conspecifics from this nest in the first phase behaved significantly more aggressively than those from the other two groups.

To test the extent to which the higher aggression arises from the behaviour of ants from a particular nest, the scientists repeated the experiment in a slightly modified form. In the first phase, they now distinguished between encounters with aggressive and passive ants. They ensured that an ant behaved passively by cutting off its antennae. In phase two of the experiment, the ants that had previously only encountered passive competitors behaved significantly less aggressively.

meanwhile we still treat other mammalians as livestock