Behavioral flexibility and innovation are crucial aspect of cognition thought to be beneficial in coping with a changing biotic and abiotic environment. Some work suggests that these traits may facilitate successful social interactions as well as invasion into novel habitats. Behavioral flexibility and innovation are often measured using multi-access boxes where individuals must perform a specific motor pattern to open a door. Learned solutions are blocked, so individuals must exhibit behavioral flexibility to develop new solutions. Here we designed and tested a novel multi-access box in three species of Polistes paper wasps: P. fuscatus, P. dominula, and P. metricus. All three species solved the multi-access box, but there was variation in innovation propensity. In all three species, queens from cooperative, multi-queen nests found more solutions than queens from single queen nests, indicating that within-species variation in cooperation is linked with better multi-access box performance. The two native species, P. fuscatus and P. metricus, found more solutions than P. dominula, an invasive species. More active wasps and wasps with higher behavioral diversity were more successful than less active wasps and wasps with lower behavioral diversity. The multi-access box described in this study is the first to use escape as a reward, a design that may be effective in other taxa with low food motivation. Therefore, multi-access boxes provide a valuable method of testing behavioral flexibility and innovation in paper wasps. Performance was linked with social cooperation, but not with invasion success.
Corcoran et al. (Sun,) studied this question.