Ants are often particularly aggressive against their neighbors – researchers call the the “nasty neighbor effect”. Our study lead by Melanie Bey shows that this can happen because ants remember the colonies they have been attacked by – and will later be more aggressive against them. This means that associative learning of colony odours, with the aggression as the “unconditioned stimulus”, plays a role in the formation of the nestmate recognition template.

The study is published open access in Current Biology and was funded by the German Research Foundation.

Bey, M., Endermann, R., Raudies, C., Steinle, J., Nehring, V. (2025): Associative learning of non- nestmate cues improves enemy recognition in ants. Curr. Biol. 35: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.11.054 

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