In the United States, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has become a sucrose replacement for honey bees and has widespread use as a sweetener in many processed foods and beverages for human consumption. It is utilized by commercial beekeepers as a food for honey bees for several reasons: to promote brood ...

Recent studies on the food-caching behavior of corvids have revealed complex physical and social skills, yet little is known about the ontogeny of food caching in relation to the development of cognitive capacities. Piagetian object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer ...

Western scrub-jays (Aphelocoma californica) engage in a variety of cache-protection strategies to reduce the chances of cache theft by conspecifics. Many of these strategies revolve around reducing visual information to potential thieves. This study aimed to determine whether the jays also reduce auditory information during caching. Each jay was given ...

Pteropus seychellensis comorensis is the only Pteropodidae bat species on the island of Mayotte (Comoros Archipelago), and most aspects of its biology are unknown. In order to catch this large bat, we used a simple and low-cost method, consisting of raised mist nets that were set close to foraging sites. ...

The concentrations of resources in forage are not perfectly balanced to the needs of an animal, and food species differ in these concentrations. Under many circumstances, animals should thus forage on multiple food species to attain the maximum and most balanced intake of several resources. In this article we present ...

In this study, we explore how an invasive social wasp, Vespula germanica (F.), deals with contextual changes while searching for a food source that is no longer available. Four experiments were conducted to evaluate the effect of different degrees of context modification on wasp behavior. Learning sessions consisted of a ...

Colonies of many ant species are not confined to a single nest but inhabit several dispersed nests, a colony organization referred to as polydomy. The benefits of polydomy are not well understood. It has been proposed that increased foraging efficiency promotes polydomy. In a spatially explicit individual-based model, I compare ...

Bees feed almost exclusively on nectar and pollen from flowers. However, little is known about how food availability limits bee populations, especially in high elevation areas. Foraging distances and relationships between forager densities and resource availability can provide insights into the potential for food limitation in mobile consumer populations. For ...

Few attempts have been made to experimentally address the extent to which temporal or spatial variation in food availability influences avian habitat use. We used an experimental approach to investigate whether bird use differed between treated (arthropods reduced through insecticide application) and control (untreated) forest canopy gaps within a bottomland ...

1. Whether intertidal areas are used to capacity by shorebirds can best be answered by large-scale manipulation of foraging areas. The recent overexploitation of benthic resources in the western Dutch Wadden Sea offers such an 'experimental' setting. 2. We review the effects of declining food abundances on red knot Calidris ...

Forager honey bees can associate the time of day with the presence of food at locations outside the hive. It is thought that this time-memory enables the bee to make a spatio-temporal match between its behavior and floral nectar secretion rhythms. Despite a long tradition of research, the mechanisms by ...

In 2 experiments, dwarf hamsters (Phodopus campbelli) were trained to find palatable foods in an open field. The location of each food patch remained the same throughout each experiment, and only 1 food was available per day. Once subjects had been trained to find each food in its unique location, ...

Studies on nonsocial insects have elucidated the regulatory strategies employed to meet nutritional demands [1-3]. However, how social insects maintain the supply of an appropriate balance of nutrients at both a collective and an individual level remains unknown. Sociality complicates nutritional regulatory strategies [4-6]. First, the food entering a colony ...

Like ants and termites some species of stingless bees (Meliponini), which are very important pollinators in the tropics, use pheromone trails to communicate the location of a food source. We present data on the communicative role of mandibular gland secretions of Meliponini that resolve a recent controversy about their importance ...

Fungus-growing ants engage in mutualistic associations with both the fungus they cultivate for food and actinobacteria (Pseudonocardia spp.) that produce selective antibiotics to defend that fungus from specialized fungal parasites. We have analyzed one such system at the molecular level and found that the bacterium associated with the ant Apterostigma ...

The honeybee (Apis mellifera) waggle dance, whereby dancing bees communicate the location of profitable food sources to other bees in the hive, is one of the most celebrated communication behaviours in the animal world. Dance followers, however, often appear to ignore this location information, the so-called dance language, after leaving ...

Pine siskins (Carduelis pinus) frequently forage at known high quality food supplies such as backyard feeders. In this field study, pine siskins visited backyard feeders of differing colour and spatial position. The three feeders contained varying amounts of food in a ratio of 3:2:1. The birds quickly distributed their visits ...

Animals selecting habitats often have to consider many factors, e.g., food and cover for safety. However, each habitat type often lacks an adequate mixture of these factors. Analyses of habitat selection using resource selection functions (RSFs) for animal radiotelemetry data typically ignore trade-offs, and the fact that these may change ...

Siberian hamsters markedly reduce their body/lipid mass ( approximately 20-45%) in short 'winter-like' days (SD). Decreases in body/lipid mass associated with food deprivation or lipectomy result in increases in foraging and food hoarding. When at their SD-induced body/lipid mass nadir, food hoarding is not increased despite their decreases in body/lipid ...

Modulation of liquid feeding-rate would allow insects to ingest more food in the same time when this was required. Ants can vary nectar intake rate by increasing sucking pump frequency according to colony requirements. We analysed electrical signals generated by sucking pump activity of ants during drinking solutions of different ...

Environmental conditions may provide specific demands for memory, which in turn may affect specific brain regions responsible for memory function. For food-caching animals, in particular, spatial memory appears to be important because it may have a direct effect on fitness via the accuracy of cache retrieval. Animals living in more ...

A year-long field experiment showed that Reticulitermes flavipes attacked and used single stakes and wooden stake bundles differently in two habitats that varied in alternative forage. In both habitats, the number of termites present in single stakes and stake-bundles increased with stake resource size, and the number of larvae recorded ...

Kleptoparasitism, the stealing of food from one animal by another, is a common natural phenomenon that has been modelled mathematically in a number of ways. The handling process of food items can take some time and the value of such items can vary depending upon how much handling an item ...

Successful foraging is necessary for procurement of nutritional resources essential for an animal's survival. Maintenance of foraging and food acquisition is dependent on the ability to balance food intake and energy expenditure. This review examines the role of cGMP-dependent protein kinase (PKG) as a regulator of foraging behaviour, food acquisition, ...

The cell provisioning and oviposition process (POP) is a unique characteristic of stingless bees (Meliponini), in which coordinated interactions between workers and queen regulate the filling of brood cells with larval resources and subsequent egg laying. Environmental conditions seem to regulate reproduction in stingless bees; however, little is known about ...

We describe a case of a spontaneously established mixed colony of two species of stingless bees. The host colony of Scaptotrigona depilis, an aggressive bee that forms large colonies, was invaded by workers of Nannotrigona testaceicornis, a smaller bee that forms small colonies. The host colony and the invading species ...

Food sharing is vital for a large number of species, either solitary or social, and is of particular importance within highly integrated societies, such as in colonial organisms and in social insects. Nevertheless, the mechanisms that govern the distribution of food inside a complex organizational system remain unknown. Using scintigraphy, ...

Neotropical leaf-cutting ants (tribe Attini) live in obligate symbiosis with fungus they culture for food. To protect themselves and their fungus garden from pathogens, they minimize the entry of microorganisms through mechanical and chemical means. In this study, focusing on the species Acromyrmex subterraneus and A. octospinosus, (Hymeoptera: Formicidae). Self- ...

When searching for prey, animals should maximize energetic gain, while minimizing energy expenditure by altering their movements relative to prey availability. However, with increasing amounts of marine debris, what once may have been 'optimal' foraging strategies for top marine predators, are leading to sub-optimal diets comprised in large part of ...

The trails formed by many ant species between nest and food source are two-way roads on which outgoing and returning workers meet and touch each other all along. The way to get back home, after grasping a food load, is to take the same route on which they have arrived ...

Food searching strategies of animals are key to their success in heterogeneous environments. The optimal search strategy may include specialized random walks such as Levy walks with heavy power-law tail distributions, or persistent walks with preferred movement in a similar direction. We have investigated the movement of the soil amoebae ...

The decision for a Lasius niger forager to lay a chemical trail and launch recruitment to a food source is governed by an internal individual threshold. The value of this threshold triggering chemical communication is not set by the maximal capacity of the crop. Actually, trail-laying ants are still able ...

In many bird species with biparental care for young in the nest, hungry chicks beg repeatedly and parents adjust their feeding rate to the call rate of young. Repetitive calling also occurs in fledglings and in some mammals where offspring follow provisioners. It is not yet clear whether, in mobile ...

Several mechanisms can explain individual differences in foraging behaviour, such as variation in predation risk between patches, variation in the ability of individuals to detect or escape from predators, variation between individuals in their requirement for food, the quality and abundance of food in different patches, phenotypic variation giving rise ...

We studied the effect of daily body mass increase on the foraging preferences of two tit species, crested tit, Parus cristatus and blue tit, P. caeruleus, contrasting in morphology and behaviour. We found that both species show a diurnal increase in body mass during winter. Using an experiment with feeders ...

In the tropical regions of the world, intercropping is mostly associated with food grain production, whereas it is receiving increased attention in temperate regions as a means of efficient forage production. The aim of this work was to determine the relative yield of aerial biomass in alfalfa or lucerne (Medicago ...

Early learning about edible food in the environment is a critical survival task for young nonhuman primates. Social learning and social facilitation are often cited to explain how youngsters learn to select and find their food. In this framework, we observed eight mother-youngster pairs of free-ranging Japanese macaques divided into ...

The relationship of the birds with Mbuti hunter-gatherers is described and analyzed. A total of 115 types of birds were observed in the Ituri Forest of the Congo Basin. Vernacular names, practical uses, food and other behavioral restrictions, and folk belief concerning these birds were recorded. While the birds occupy ...

Wild isolates of Caenorhabditis elegans differ in their tendency to aggregate on food [1, 2]. Most quantitative variation in this behavior is explained by a polymorphism at a single amino acid in the G protein-coupled receptor NPR-1: gregarious strains carry the 215F allele, and solitary strains carry the 215V allele ...

Biological and ecological attributes of 24 species of edible bivalves and gastropods from the Gilbert Islands Group, Kiribati, Micronesia, were assessed for their resilience by examining size at maturity, intertidal burying, adjacent subtidal populations, benthic mobility, and larval type. Foraging for mollusks is largely confined to the intertidal and shallow ...

Most animals can distinguish between small quantities (less than four) innately. Many animals can also distinguish between larger quantities after extensive training. However, the adaptive significance of numerical discriminations in wild animals is almost completely unknown. We conducted a series of experiments to test whether a food-hoarding songbird, the New ...

This study empirically tests two foundation ecological theories: (1) pack hunting is a driver for the evolution of sociality; and (2) species have a finite energy potential, whereby increased maintenance costs result in decreased reproductive effort. Using activity and prey data from 22 packs of African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus), ...

To address some concerns about the expansion of genetically engineered pharmaceutical and industrial crops to outdoor plantings and potential impacts on the human food supply, we determined whether commercial agriculture seeds of maize or corn Zea mays L., barley Hordeum vulgare L., safflower Carthamus tinctorius L. and rice Oryza sativa ...

Although several studies have examined how honeybees gauge and report the distance and direction of a food source to their nestmates, relatively little is known about how this information is combined to obtain a representation of the position of the food source. In this study we manipulate the amount of ...

To explain the preference of wintering greylag geese Anser anser for small Scirpus maritimus tubers (<10mm) over larger ones, our hypothesis was that the former would provide higher intake rates. This 'consumption rate hypothesis' was tested experimentally by deriving the functional responses of geese feeding on tubers of three contrasting ...

This study reports new information on interactions between two sympatric ant species, the plant-ant Azteca alfari (Dolichoderinae) living in association with the myrmecophyte Cecropia obtusa (Cecropiaceae) and Camponotus blandus (Formicinae), a ground-nesting, arboreal-foraging species. Workers of A. alfari forage only on the foliage and the upper parts of the trunk ...

Kleptoparasitism, the stealing of food by one animal from another, is a widespread biological phenomenon. In this paper we build upon earlier models to investigate a population of conspecifics involved in foraging and, potentially, kleptoparasitism. We assume that the population is composed of four types of individuals, according to their ...

Animals principally forage to try to maximize energy intake per unit of feeding time, developing different foraging strategies. Temperature effects on foraging have been observed in diverse ant species; these effects are limited to the duration of foraging or the number of foragers involved. The harvester ant Messor barbarus L. ...

Five insecticides used by urban pest management professionals for ant control and three experimental insecticides were tested to determine whether these insecticides were horizontally transferred among individuals in colonies of Argentine ants, Linepithema humile (Mayr) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Ants were exposed to insecticide-treated sand for 1 min and then placed in ...

Mast seeding is a common phenomenon, and has important effects on seed dispersal and hoarding by animals. At population level, the predator satiation hypothesis proposes that the satiating effect of a large amount of seeds on a relatively small number of predators benefits seed survival in mast-seeding years. However, the ...