Aimee Dunlap

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Missouri–St. Louis

Urban areas boast high bee species richness and abundance, but little is known of their overall behavior or potential plasticity. The physical movements of bees on flowers are an extremely important aspect of their behavioral repertoire, as foraging for pollen has implications for bee population health and plant reproductive success. In this study...

The waggle dance of honey bees is a classic example of complex behavior and communication in animals. Despite long being considered a completely fixed and innate behavior, recent work is showing a role for social learning in tuning components of the waggle dance in naïve bees.

Environmental effects on learning are well known, such as cognition that is mediated by nutritional consumption. Less known is how seasonally variable environments affect phenological trajectories of learning. Here, we test the hypothesis that nutritional availability affects seasonal trajectories of population-level learning in species with develo...

Diurnal pollinators often rely on color cues to make decisions when visiting flowers. Orchid bees are major tropical pollinators, with most studies of their pollination behavior to date focusing on scent collection and chemical ecology. The objective of this study was to measure their spectral sensitivities to preliminarily characterize color visio...

Numerous animal species can survive in human-modified habitats, but often display behavioral, morphological, physiological or genetic plasticity compared to non-urban conspecifics. One group of organisms with a large urban presence are bees. Bee species have high diversity and abundance in cities, which has been empirically supported in numerous st...

Not all information should be learned and remembered. The value of information is tied to the reliability and certainty of that information, which itself is determined by rates of environmental change, both within and across lifetimes. Theory of adaptive forgetting and remembering posits that memory should reflect the environment, with more valuabl...

Evolution of Learning and Memory Mechanisms is an exploration of laboratory and field research on the many ways that evolution has influenced learning and memory processes, such as associative learning, social learning, and spatial, working, and episodic memory systems. This volume features research by both outstanding early-career scientists as we...

Environmental heterogeneity resulting from human-modified landscapes can increase intraspecific trait variation. However, less known is whether such phenotypic variation is driven by plastic or adaptive responses to local environments. Here, we study five bumble bee (Apidae: Bombus) species across an urban gradient in the greater Saint Louis, Misso...

Sex-specific cognitive abilities are well documented. These can occur when sexes engage in different ecological contexts. Less known is whether different ecological contexts can also drive sex-specific participation rates in behavioral tests. Here, we explore this question in bumble bees, a group of eusocial insects where worker females and males e...

Behavior courses face numerous challenges when moving to an online environment, as has been made necessary by the COVID-19 pandemic. These challenges occur largely because behavior courses, like most organismal biology courses, often stress experiential learning through laboratories that involve live animals, as well as a lecture component that emp...

Face-to-face classes in animal behavior often stress experiential learning through laboratories that involve observation of live animals, as well as a lecture component that emphasizes formative assessment, discussion and critical thinking. As a result, behavior courses face unique challenges when moving to an online environment, as has been made n...

Population declines have been documented in approximately one-third of bumble bee species. Certain drivers of these declines are known; however, less is known about the interspecific trait differences that make certain species more susceptible to decline. Two traits that have implications for responding to rapidly changed environments may be partic...

Animals have evolved in complex, heterogeneous environments. Thus, decision-making behavior is likely affected by a diversity of co-occurring community-level traits. Here, we investigate how 3 co-occurring traits of floral communities-the number of flower types, reliability that flowers are associated with a reward, and signal complexity of flowers...

Animals reduce uncertainty in their lifetime by using information to guide decision making. Information available can be inherited from the past or gathered from the present. Therefore, animals must balance inherited biases with new information that may be in conflict with those potential biases. In our study, we set up color pairings such that an...

Theoretical treatments of the evolution of learning have a long and rich history, and although many aspects remain unresolved, the consensus is that the predictability and timescale of environmental change play a crucial role in when learning evolves. Directly testing these ideas has proven difficult because comparative experiments must assume many...

Preferences are the foundation of economics. Preferences are taken by economists as fixed by some implicitly biological process. In recent decades, behavioral economics has documented the divergence between the nature of human preferences and the assumptions of standard economics. In this study, we use the tool of experimental evolution to study th...

This chapter considers foraging behavior and its connections with learning and memory. The chapter reviews the basic models of foraging that behavioral ecologists have developed over the last 40 years. These models provide an economic framework for the study of foraging. Animals forage in a changing environment, and they must adjust their foraging...

Drosophila melanogaster populations were evolved under the oviposition paradigm; therefore, we tested females using the t-maze and an aversive olfactory conditioning protocol. This testing method was based on Dr. Josh Dubnau’s discoveries of memory mechanisms specifically related to short-term memory. After these behavioral tests were performed, we...

The question of when to collect new information and how to apply that information is central to much of behaviour. Theory suggests that the value of collecting information, or sampling, depends on environmental persistence and on the relative costs of making wrong decisions. However, empirical tests of how these variables interact are lacking.We te...

Many animals, including insects, make decisions using both personally gathered information and social information derived from the behavior of other, usually conspecific, individuals [1]. Moreover, animals adjust use of social versus personal information appropriately under a variety of experimental conditions [2-5]. An important factor in how info...

This is a theory paper that advocates experimental evolution as a novel approach to study economic preferences. Economics could benefit because preferences are exogenous, axiomatic, and contentious. Experimental evolution allows the empirical study of preferences by placing organisms in designed environments and studying their genotype and phenotyp...

Significance Learning is one of the most basic phenomena in the behavioral sciences. Animals learn some things better than others, and understanding what constrains this basic process is fundamental to our understanding of learning. Our paper applies an evolutionary approach to this question. We offer a simple model that considers the fitness of va...

In the present paper, we explore a novel preparation for the study of animal choice behaviour designed to capture some aspects of naturally occurring patch exploitation. Although one can cast the problem of patch exploitation as a binary choice, naturally occurring patch-leaving decisions are inevitably asymmetric. We asked whether captive blue jay...

Memory is a fundamental component of learning, a process by which individuals alter their behavior through experience. Although memory most likely has explicit costs such as synaptic maintenance and metabolic demands, there are also implicit costs to memory, in particular, the use of information that is no longer appropriate or is incorrect. Specif...

Several phenomena in animal learning seem to call for evolutionary explanations, such as patterns of what animals learn and do not learn. While several models consider how evolution should influence learning, we have very little data testing these models. Theorists agree that environmental change is a central factor in the evolution of learning. We...

This study compares two procedures for the study of choices that differ in time and amount, namely the self-control and patch procedures. The self-control procedure offers animals a binary mutually exclusive choice between a smaller-sooner and larger-later option. This procedure dominates the choice literature. It seems to address the idea of choic...

Experimental animals often prefer small but immediate rewards even when larger-delayed rewards provide a higher rate of intake. This impulsivity has important implications for models of foraging and cooperation. Behavioral ecologists have hypothesized that animals discount delayed rewards because delay imposes a collection risk. According to this l...

Based on differing roles during the breeding season, male pinyon jays are predicted to be more accurate than females in recovering cached seeds over long retention intervals. We additionally predicted that males should be able to accurately recover caches made by their mates over short and long retention intervals. We conducted four experiments to...

We conducted an experiment to test three alternative hypotheses for the function of frequency of scent marking in male prairie voles, MICROTUS OCHROGASTER: (1) sexual attraction (to advertise male quality for mating); (2) reproductive competition; and (3) self-advertisement or individual identity. In laboratory experiments, males deposited scent on...

Promiscuous mating is common in female rodents; however what role the female plays in this choice of mates is not clear. Also, whether MMM occurs in the reportedly socially monogamous prairie vole, Microtus ochrogaster, and what role mate-guarding plays in deterring MMM is not known. We conducted two experiments to determine if female prairie voles...

We conducted a mating experiment in the laboratory using prairie voles, Microtus ochrogaster, to document that multi-male mating (MMM) can occur in this supposedly monogamous species and to test two hypotheses for the advantages of MMM in female mammals. The two hypotheses are that MMM (1) increases the probability of pregnancy and (2) increases li...

Reproductive suppression of young females by conspecific females has been reported from laboratory studies on several species of rodents, including the prairie vole, Microtus ochrogaster, but not meadow voles, M. pennsylvanicus. We exposed female prairie voles and meadow voles to two treatments: a mother and one 23-26-day-old daughter paired with a...