Parasitic wasp species of the genus Nasonia provide unique opportunities to study natural variation in memory retention and LTM formation.
Our study with Nasonia provides novel insight in the genetic mechanisms responsible for natural variation in memory retention.
There is substantial variation in memory retention among closely related species in the parasitic wasp genus Nasonia.
Concluding, this study demonstrates a powerful approach to study variation in memory retention and provides a basis for future research on its genetic basis.
It remains to be investigated whether these and other known LTM genes are also involved in natural variation in memory retention, which is the focus of this study.
Knowledge of the genetic basis of natural variation in memory retention is important for our understanding of the evolution of this variation, not only in Nasonia, but also in other animal species.
Parasitic wasps are instrumental for studying natural variation in memory retention and the number of conditioning trials required to form LTM, as there is substantial variation between closely related parasitic wasp species (Hoedjes et al., 2011).
Fig. 4 Variation of memory bandwidth on an Azure D14 instance.
A highly flexible experimental design incorporated a broad variation of memory load and delay time.
The graph shows the variation in memory bandwidth on an idle Azure cloud instance during the course of a day.
