Habitat structure — an important consideration in all ecological studies of relationships between animals and their environment — can be studied at different scales. This topic was studied at the microhabitat scale in burned and unburned plots of a dry forest of Madagascar. The response of two endemic terrestrial coua ...

An in-situ behavioral study of giant mudskipper (Periophthalmodon schlosseri) was conducted in the coastal mudflat of Kuala Gula, Matang Mangrove Reserve, Perak. Observations were made based on scan and focal sampling methods during low tides. The main objective of this study was to understand the foraging behaviors and food selection ...

Exotic ant incursions are becoming more frequent around the globe, and management with toxic baits is a suitable strategy for most species. Crazy ants, (Latreille) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), however, are notoriously difficult to attract to commercial baits, which are generally tailored to the preferences of fire ants. We tested P. longicornis ...

Primates usually locate food resources using visual cues and memory, yet the potential for olfactory-guided (or olfactory-assisted) food location remains relatively unexplored. Here we report observations of wild Propithecus diadema that strongly suggest that olfaction is used to locate the inflorescences of two subterranean parasitic plant species (Langsdorffia sp. and ...

Stingless bees of the species Trigona spinipes (Fabricius 1793) use their saliva to lay scent trails communicating the location of profitable food sources. Extracts of the cephalic labial glands of the salivary system (not the mandibular glands, however) contain a large amount (approx. 74%) of octyl octanoate. This ester is ...

We extend the game theoretic model of kleptoparasitism discussed in Broom et al. (2004), by considering a population of foragers consisting of two groups with different behaviours--those who forage and steal from other feeders, and those who only forage. We a sume that those who do not steal have a ...

Species interactions may profoundly influence disease outbreaks. However, disease ecology has only begun to integrate interactions between hosts and their food resources (foraging ecology) despite that hosts often encounter their parasites while feeding. A zooplankton-fungal system illustrated this central connection between foraging and transmission. Using experiments that varied food density ...

Recruitment precision, i.e. the proportion of recruits that reach an advertised food source, is a crucial adaptation of social bees to their environment. Studies with honeybees showed that recruitment precision is not a fixed feature, but it may be enhanced by factors like experience and distance. However, little is known ...

Morphology influences the rate at which foraging bees visit nectar flowers, the quantity of nectar they must consume to fuel their activities, and, consequently, the profitability of flower species. Because feeding time is a major determinant of visitation rate, I used a biomechanical model to examine how energy intake rate ...

Knowledge of and planning for the future is a complex skill that is considered by many to be uniquely human. We are not born with it; children develop a sense of the future at around the age of two and some planning ability by only the age of four to ...

Seals may delay costly physiological processes (e.g. digestion) that are incompatible with the physiological adjustments to diving until after periods of active foraging. We present unusual profiles of metabolic rate (MR) in grey seals measured during long-term simulation of foraging trips (4-5 days) that provide evidence for this. We measured ...

Greater flamingos in southern Spain foraged in areas distant from a breeding site, spending 4-6 days in foraging areas between successive visits to the colony to feed their chicks. During four years, we took blood samples from chicks to ascertain whether there were interannual variations in several blood parameters, indicative ...

The Asian weaver ant (Oecophylla smaragdina) larvae and pupae are collected in the wild from trees and commercialised as songbird food and fishing bait in Java, Indonesia. The produce called kroto brings substancial income to numerous rural households throughout the year. The resource's durability is until ensured by the species' ...

A field experiment was conducted to examine the effect of perceived predation risk on the use of foraging areas by juvenile and adult primates under different conditions of local food abundance. Wild squirrel monkeys, Saimiri sciureus, were observed in an experiment conducted during the dry and the wet seasons at ...

The functional response, i.e. the change in per capita food intake rate per time unit with changed food availability, is a widely used tool for understanding the ecology and behaviour of animals. However, waterfowl remain poorly explored in this context. In an aviary experiment we derived a functional response curve ...

Individuals select for habitats at different scales. Can a species' response to different spatial and temporal heterogeneities be placed in a common currency? Is it possible to rank the relative importance of different habitat features on the organism's behavior and ecology? Do the effects of different spatial and temporal heterogeneities ...

Seabirds have become adapted for foraging in an oceanic environment that can be highly dynamic. Oceanographic processes determine the spatial distribution of seabird prey, while seasonality often has a temporal influence on prey availability. In penguins, these factors are reflected in the different species’ foraging strategies. Penguins can broadly be ...

Dietary shifts are commonly exhibited by omnivorous consumers when foraging from variable food resources. One advantage of dietary shifts for a consumer is the ability to gain complementary resources from different foods. In addition, dietary shifts often affect food-web dynamics. Despite the importance of dietary shifts to organismal, community, and ...

Hawksbill turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata) migrate between nesting beaches and feeding habitats that are often associated with tropical reefs, but it is uncertain which nesting colonies supply which feeding habitats. To address this gap in hawksbill biology, we compile previously published and new mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplotype data for 10 nesting ...

Carmine bee-eaters make attractive additions to zoo aviaries but breeding programs have had challenges and limited success. The objectives of this study were to document nesting behavior of Carmine bee-eaters in a captive setting and compare reproductive success between a novel nest box (plastic, 17 x 30 x 22 cm) ...

1. Heterogeneity in food abundance allows a forager to concentrate foraging effort in patches that are rich in food. This might be problematic when food is cryptic, as the content of patches is unknown prior to foraging. In such case knowledge about the spatial pattern in the distribution of food ...

BACKGROUND: Social insects (ants, bees, wasps and termites) are considered as prime examples of altruism in which individuals (workers) forego their own reproduction to help other individuals reproduce. Such a behaviour is favoured by natural selection because the workers rear close kin and in doing so enhance their inclusive fitness. ...

BACKGROUND: Little is known about the relationships between objectively measured commute distance with actual and perceived transport-related physical activity (TPA) engagement. METHODS: A telephone survey assessed travel behaviors to place of work/study within an adult sample (n = 772) residing in New Zealand. RESULT: Overall, 50% of respondents perceived they ...

BACKGROUND: The Central Limit Theorem (CLT) is a statistical principle that states that as the number of repeated samples from any population increase, the variance among sample means will decrease and means will become more normally distributed. It has been conjectured that the CLT has the potential to provide benefits ...

Several North American species of Pogonomyrmex harvester ants exhibit group foraging, whereas South American species are exclusively solitary foragers. The composition of the secretions of the poison and Dufour glands in the South American species, Pogonomyrmex vermiculatus, were analyzed, and the secretions and their components were tested as trail pheromones ...

A field study on foraging activity and proteinacous food preference was performed on the tropical fire ant (Solenopsis geminata) (Fabricius) at the School of Biological Sciences and Desasiswa Bakti Permai, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Penang. Foraging activity studies of 4 colonies of S. geminata were conducted in the field for ...

In gregarious insects, the exploration and the use of the home range can involve both individual navigational abilities and/or chemical trails. Trail formation can result from an active laying of pheromones but can also derive from the incidental deposition of chemical cues. In this study, we investigated whether scent trails ...

A central point in life history theory is that parental investment in current reproduction should be balanced by the costs in terms of residual reproductive value. Long-lived seabirds are considered fixed investors, that is, parents fix a specific level of investment in their current reproduction independent to the breeding requirements. ...

Honeybees learn odor cues quickly and efficiently when visiting rewarding flowers. Memorization of these cues facilitates the localization and recognition of food sources during foraging flights. Bees can also use information gained inside the hive during social interactions with successful foragers. An important information cue that can be learned during ...

The decision for an ant forager to launch recruitment is governed by an internal response threshold. Here, we demonstrate that this threshold (the desired volume) triggering trail-laying increases under starvation. As a consequence, highly starved foragers lay a recruitment trail and bring back to the nest higher quantities of food ...

The ability of bees to generate metabolic heat plays an important role in their ability to forage and pollinate because they must achieve a minimum temperature to activate their flight muscles. In honey bees and stingless bees, the thoracic temperature of feeding foragers is correlated with the caloric value of ...

1. The carrying capacity of a site for migratory water birds, expressed in bird-days, can be of particular conservation value. Several attempts have been made to model this carrying capacity using ideal free distribution models such as, for instance, depletion models, in which the distribution is fully determined by exploitative ...

We examined the quantitative relationship between the energetic costs and benefits of nectar collection by nectar-feeding ants, Camponotus rufipes. In the laboratory, individual workers were trained to visit an artificial feeder that provided a sucrose solution of 1%, 5%, 10%, 30% or 50% at controlled flows, in a similar span ...

Across 3 experiments, the authors examined the effects of temporal distance on negotiation behavior. They found that greater temporal distance from negotiation decreased preference for piecemeal, single-issue consideration over integrative, multi-issue consideration (Experiment 1). They also found that greater temporal distance from an event being negotiated increased interest in conceding ...

The evolution of cooperation and altruistic behaviour where individuals forego their own reproduction to help others reproduce can be explained by kin selection. Depending on the costs and benefits provided, altruism can be evolutionarily favoured if it is directed at close relatives. A considerable body of data supports the role ...

The aim of this study was to explore how a heterogeneous landscape affects food encounter rate in the Formosan subterranean termite, Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki. To do this, a lattice model was formulated to simulate the tunneling structure of the termite. The model made use of minimized local rules derived from ...

The use of tool or tool-like food processing behaviours can render animals vulnerable to theft (kleptoparasitism) because (1) large, nutritious items are usually involved, (2) value is added to the food due to long and/or complex handling, and (3) physical control of items is often temporarily lost during handling. In ...

Social foraging is suggested to increase foraging efficiency, as individuals might benefit from public information acquired by monitoring the foraging activities of other group members. We conducted a series experiments with captive common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) to investigate to what extent marmosets utilize social information about food location when foraging ...

This study provides quantitative field data on the natural history and foraging behaviour of the Neotropical bromeliad-nesting ant Gnamptogenys moelleri (Ponerinae) in a sandy plain forest in Southeast Brazil. The ant nested on different bromeliad species and the nests were more frequently found in bigger bromeliads. The species used a ...

In an Upper Sonoran Grassland Community, three species of Pogonomyrmex ants coexist. Due to the similarity in their diets and the apparent limitation of food, coexistence is aided by the differential utilization of the available food, according to size and type. Interspecific differences in morphology, physiology and microhabitat nesting sites ...

This work is concerned with elucidating competitive interactions between two neotropical ants, Solenopsis geminata and Pheidole radoszkowskii , focusing on their foraging behavior. When released from competition from P. radoszkowskii, S. geminata increased its foraging activity. On the other hand, when released from competition from S. geminata, P. radoszkowskii did ...

Observations of the ponerine ant Ectatomma ruidum suggested that this is a cleptobiotic species which appears to use the pheromone trails of other ant species to locate individual workers carrying food. To test this hypothesis an arena was set up to quantify the position of each E. ruidum that entered ...

The "thrifty genotype hypothesis" has become firmly entrenched as one of the orienting concepts in biomedical anthropology, since first being proposed by Neel (1962 Am. J. Hum. Genet. 14:353-362) over 40 years ago. Its influence on inquiries into the evolutionary origins of diabetes, lactose tolerance, and other metabolic disorders can ...

The Bird Integrity Index (BII) presented here uses bird assemblage information to assess human impacts to 28 stream reaches in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon. Eighty-one candidate metrics were extracted from bird survey data for testing. The metrics represented aspects of bird taxonomic richness, tolerance or intolerance to human ...

We tested whether Tundra Swans use information on the spatial distribution of cryptic food items (below ground Sago pondweed tubers) to shape their movement paths. In a continuous environment, swans create their own food patches by digging craters, which they exploit in several feeding bouts. Series of short (<1 m) ...

Some ants and bees readily learn visually guided routes between their nests and feeding sites. They can learn the appearance of visual landmarks for the food-bound or homeward segment of the route when these landmarks are only present during that particular segment of their round trip. We show here that ...

I studied the foraging ecology of Coquerel's Coua (Coua coquereli) and Giant Coua (Coua gigas), which occur in the dry forest in west Madagascar. This kind of forest is characterised by an alternating of a dry and a rainy season. The foraging behaviour was described in several dimensions: i.e. height ...

Optimality theory rests on the assumptions that short-term foraging decisions are driven by variation in environmental quality, and that these decisions have important implications for long-term fitness. These assumptions, however, are rarely tested in a field setting. We linked behavioral foraging decisions in food patches with measures of environmental quality ...

Subterranean termites excavate tunnels in a search pattern to encounter food in soil. To investigate the effect of food size, food distribution and the branch length of tunnels on food encounter rate we used a lattice gas model to simulate tunnels of the Formosan subterranean termite, Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki. The ...

A population of 79 babirusa distributed over 19 zoos in Europe and the United States were the subject of a study of the foraging behaviour, food selection, and digestion of the babirusa (Babyrousa babyrussa). Stomachs of six adult babirusa and one twelve month old animal were collected from zoological gardens. ...