Practice makes perfect? Experience boosts foraging performance in a ponerine ant

Understanding how internal mechanisms, social dynamics, and environmental factors interact to influence foraging behaviour is essential to unravel the complexity of decision-making in social insects. Despite extensive research on foraging behaviour in social insects, the mechanisms driving solitary foraging, particularly in Neotropical species, remain largely unexplored. This laboratory study evaluated how experience, colony size, and food distribution affect foraging activity, exploration, and success in a standardised situation in Pachycondyla striata . Experience was not experimentally controlled and depended on the ants' behavioural decisions. Additionally, we investigated whether behavioural traits associated with foraging are consistent across time and environmental contexts. Experience significantly increased foraging activity, exploration, and success. Foragers with prior successful experience were more likely to explore and achieve subsequent success. Workers’ activity was lower with dispersed food distribution. Colony-level differences were observed in activity, and intercolonial and interindividual differences emerged in foraging success, suggesting weak but consistent behavioural patterns across both levels of organisation. These findings emphasise the importance of experience and environmental modulation in ant foraging decisions. By demonstrating how internal and external factors influence task execution, this study advances our understanding of behavioural plasticity in social insects and suggests a strong effect of experience- and learning-based motivational processes on individual behaviour. This knowledge provides a framework to explore foraging strategies and colony dynamics in solitary foraging systems.