Rate of Supply of Sugar Solution and Behaviour of Collector Wasps (<i>Paravespula germanica</i>)

Pflumm, Walter

doi:10.1111/j.1439-0310.1986.tb00601.x

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Collective foraging by social insects is a complex process that involves assessment of resource quality by workers, decision making, food carriage and information transfer (e.g., bees [1] , [2] ; bumblebees [3] ; wasps [4] ; ants [5] , [6] ). A social insect colony does not “decide” about, for instance, the selection of a given food source, yet the colony's foraging responses arise from the decisions made by each individual worker, and from the interactions among colony members.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Needs at the Beginning of Foraging: Grass-Cutting Ants Trade Off Load Size for a Faster Return to the Nest

Bollazzi

Roces

2011

PLoS ONE

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BackgroundAcquisition of information about food sources is essential for animals that forage collectively like social insects. Foragers deliver two commodities to the nest, food and information, and they may favor the delivery of one at the expenses of the other. We predict that information needs should be particularly high at the beginning of foraging: the decision to return faster to the nest will motivate a grass-cutting ant worker to reduce its loading time, and so to leave the source with a partial load.Principal FindingsField results showed that at the initial foraging phase, most grass-cutting ant foragers (Acromyrmex heyeri) returned unladen to the nest, and experienced head-on encounters with outgoing workers. Ant encounters were not simply collisions in a probabilistic sense: outgoing workers contacted in average 70% of the returning foragers at the initial foraging phase, and only 20% at the established phase. At the initial foraging phase, workers cut fragments that were shorter, narrower, lighter and tenderer than those harvested at the established one. Foragers walked at the initial phase significantly faster than expected for the observed temperatures, yet not at the established phase. Moreover, when controlling for differences in the fragment-size carried, workers still walked faster at the initial phase. Despite the higher speed, their individual transport rate of vegetable tissue was lower than that of similarly-sized workers foraging later at the same patch.Conclusions/SignificanceAt the initial foraging phase, workers compromised their individual transport rates of material in order to return faster to the colony. We suggest that the observed flexible cutting rules and the selection of partial loads at the beginning of foraging are driven by the need of information transfer, crucial for the establishment and maintenance of a foraging process to monopolize a discovered resource.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Needs at the Beginning of Foraging: Grass-Cutting Ants Trade Off Load Size for a Faster Return to the Nest

Bollazzi

Roces

2011

PLoS ONE

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“…This implicitly assumes that animals can measure the rate of resource acquisition and that this directly influences their decision‐making. For example, ants ( Camponotus rufipes ), honeybees ( Apis mellifera ), and wasps ( Paravespula germanica ) appear to be sensitive to nectar flow rates when foraging from artificial feeders, and modify their foraging behaviours accordingly (Pflumm, 1986; Wainselboim, Roces, & Farina, 2002; Schilman & Roces, 2003). Rats have also been shown to measure the time required to consume a piece of food, and directly use this information when engaging in food protection behaviours (Whishaw & Gorny, 1994; Wallace et al ., 2006).…”

Section: Foragingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The ecological significance of time sense in animals

Garcia

Dyer

et al. 2020

Biological Reviews

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Time is a fundamental dimension of all biological events and it is often assumed that animals have the capacity to track the duration of experienced events (known as interval timing). Animals can potentially use temporal information as a cue during foraging, communication, predator avoidance, or navigation. Interval timing has been traditionally investigated in controlled laboratory conditions but its ecological relevance in natural environments remains unclear. While animals may time events in artificial and highly controlled conditions, they may not necessarily use temporal information in natural environments where they have access to other cues that may have more relevance than temporal information. Herein we critically evaluate the ecological contexts where interval timing has been suggested to provide adaptive value for animals. We further discuss attributes of interval timing that are rarely considered in controlled laboratory studies. Finally, we encourage consideration of ecological relevance when designing future interval‐timing studies and propose future directions for such experiments.

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“…In addition, these animals can be trained to drink nectar from a variety of artificial flowers in enclosures. To take advantage of this, several researchers have developed artificial flowers that replenish automatically, using power-driven nectar pumps (Bertsch 1984;Pflumm 1986;Giurfa 1996;Moffatt 2001;Schilman and Roces 2003) or electromagnetically controlled flowers that draw nectar from a reservoir (Hartling and Plowright 1979;Keasar et al 1996;Cnaani et al 2006). In combination with temporal records of visitation patterns, these sophisticated devices have allowed experimenters to estimate the standing crop of nectar a flower at any one time.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An automated system for tracking and identifying individual nectar foragers at multiple feeders

Ohashi

D’Souza²,

Thomson

2010

Behav Ecol Sociobiol

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Nectar-feeding animals have served as the subjects of many experimental studies and theoretical models of foraging. Their willingness to visit artificial feeders renders many species amenable to controlled experiments using mechanical "flowers" that replenish nectar automatically. However, the structural complexity of such feeders and the lack of a device for tracking the movements of multiple individuals have limited our ability to ask some specific questions related to natural foraging contexts, especially in competitive situations. To overcome such difficulties, we developed an experimental system for producing computer records of multiple foragers harvesting from simple artificial flowers with known rates of nectar secretion, using radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to identify individual animals. By using infrared detectors (LEDs and phototransistors) to activate the RFID readers momentarily when needed, our system prevents the RFID chips from heating up and disturbing the foraging behavior of focal animals. To demonstrate these advantages, we performed a preliminary experiment with a captive colony of bumble bees, Bombus impatiens. In the experiment, two bees were tagged with RFID chips (2.5 x 2.5 mm, manufactured by Hitachi-Maxell, Ltd., Tokyo, Japan) and allowed to forage on 16 artificial flowers arranged in a big flight cage. Using the resulting data set, we present details of how the bees increased their travel speed between flowers, while decreasing the average nectar crop per flower, as they gained experience. Our system provides a powerful tool to track the movement patterns, reward history, and long-term foraging performance of individual foragers at large spatial scales.

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Rate of Supply of Sugar Solution and Behaviour of Collector Wasps (Paravespula germanica)

Cited by 5 publications

References 7 publications

Information Needs at the Beginning of Foraging: Grass-Cutting Ants Trade Off Load Size for a Faster Return to the Nest

Information Needs at the Beginning of Foraging: Grass-Cutting Ants Trade Off Load Size for a Faster Return to the Nest

The ecological significance of time sense in animals

An automated system for tracking and identifying individual nectar foragers at multiple feeders

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