How early learning affects the foraging behavior of predatory mites
P. Schausberger1, A. Walzer1, S. Saussure1,2, D. Hoffmann1, S. Peneder1, U.
Davaasambuu1,3, S. Szin1, H. Rahmani1,4, A. Ambichl1
1
Institute of Plant Protection, Department of Applied Plant Sciences and Plant Biotechnology,
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Peter Jordanstrasse 82, 1190 Vienna,
Austria; 2Supagro Montpellier, France; 3School of Agrobiology, Mongolian State University of
Agriculture, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; 4Department of Plant Protection, Faculty of Agriculture,
Zanjan University, Iran. Email: peter.schausberger@boku.ac.at
Learning, change in behavior after experience, is a ubiquitous phenomenon in both
vertebrate and invertebrate animals. Learning may affect every major life activity and allows
behavioral optimization in variable environments. In arthropods, learning in the context of
foraging is particularly well documented for adult insects with a taxonomic bias on flies, bees
and parasitoid hymenopterans. In contrast, relatively little is known about learning by true
predators and juvenile individuals. True predators such as phytoseiid mites typically feed
throughout life using the same feeding mode and have a less intimate relation to individual
food items than parasitoids. These characteristics, ease of rearing and usability in
manipulative experiments make phytoseiid mites perfectly suited animals to scrutinize the
consequences of juvenile learning for later life. Here, we give a synopsis of recent studies
demonstrating how experience with a given prey in the early stages of life may change
foraging behavior and enhance fitness-related life history traits of adult phytoseiid mites. The
first example deals with adaptive learning in the specialist spider mite predator Phytoseiulus
persimilis. Adult females that had fed on an alternative prey, conspecific individuals, during
juvenile development, attacked this prey sooner than naïve females did, optimized their daily
predation rates and had enhanced survival prospects. The second example shows that adult
females of Neoseiulus californicus, a generalist predator with a ranked preference for spider
mites, have shorter attack latencies and higher predation rates on the alternative prey,
western flower thrips, after imprinting on this prey in the early stages of development. The
third example highlights that the effects of experience with thrips and/or spider mites by
juvenile Amblyseius swirskii, a broad generalist predator without known prey preference, on
adult foraging behavior and oviposition greatly depend on the point in time and sequence of
experiences with these prey species during ontogeny.