New paper from Einat’s group: Social modulation of individual preferences in cockroaches

21. Januar 2021

What is the reason for behaving differently in public? Working on this question in gregarious cockroaches that use communal housing (shelters), they have discovered that the reason relates to interactions between food- and social- sensitive neurons.

→ Cockroaches invert their innate preference to vanillin when in a group
→ The inversion occurs also when the social context is replaced with a colony odor
→ Vanillin-related antennal lobe activity is reduced in presence of a colony odor
→ This could serve as a mechanism to avoid recently exploited resources

Günzel et al. "Social modulation of individual preferences in cockroaches." Iscience 24.1 (2021): 101964.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2020.101964