4.5 Article

Adaptive tuning of the exploitation-exploration trade-off in four honey bee species

期刊

出版社

SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s00265-020-02938-6

关键词

Exploitation versus exploration; Trade-off; Honey bees; Nest architecture; Foraging behavior

资金

  1. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship [DGE-1848739]
  2. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide Fellowship - National Science Foundation [DGE-1848739]
  3. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide Fellowship - Science and Engineering Research Board [DGE-1848739]
  4. FulbrightNehru Fellowship - US Department of State [2018/ST/89]
  5. FulbrightNehru Fellowship - Republic of India [2018/ST/89]
  6. Michigan State University Department of Integrative Biology
  7. National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS-TIFR) [12P4167]
  8. Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India [472, 12-RD-TFR-5.04-0800]

向作者/读者索取更多资源

The study suggests that the foraging behavior of honey bee species is influenced by factors such as nest architecture and the magnitude of reward decrease, with environmental context potentially playing a role in modulating species differences in behavior. This highlights the complex interactions of life history and ecology in shaping behavior evolution.
Foraging animals continually face the decision of whether to exploit known resources or explore for new ones, a decision with large implications for their fitness. Though animal foraging decisions have been extensively studied, we currently lack a deep understanding of how the exploitation-exploration trade-off has evolved, including how it is shaped by divergent selection pressures between species. As a first step towards examining how the exploitation-exploration trade-off has been adaptively tuned by natural selection, we compared the exploratory behavior of four honey bee species that differ in traits such as nest architecture, body size, and colony size. In a common behavioral context-exploratory behavior triggered by a decrease in quality of a known food resource-we found species differences in exploratory behavior that are consistent with selection arising from evolved differences in nest architecture, though the behavioral differences were also strongly influenced by the magnitude of the reward decrease. We had expected that species that build their nests in the open, and hence face a higher fitness cost of worker attrition compared with species that inhabit protective cavities, would be less likely to prolong unrewarded search when food declines in quality. The behavioral data were partially consistent with this expectation. However, at times, the environmental context strongly modulated species differences in behavior that would be expected based on nest architecture. Overall, our results suggest that the resolution of the exploitation-exploration trade-off has been adaptively tuned between species by a number of interacting selection pressures. Significance statement Foraging animals must constantly decide whether to exploit known resources or explore for new, potentially better, ones. How animals resolve this trade-off is likely to have a cumulative effect on their fitness, so natural selection should shape it according to species-specific differences in life history. Using an experimental approach comparing four honey bee species, our results suggest that the tendency to engage in costly search is shaped by multiple interactions among selection pressures differing between honey bee species. We found a correlation between search and how species build their nests, with species nesting in the open generally searching less than those nesting in cavities. However, past experience with a reward can sometimes interact with or overshadow the patterns expected based on nesting behavior. These patterns highlight the complicated effects of life history and ecology on the evolution of behavior.

作者

我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。

评论

主要评分

4.5
评分不足

次要评分

新颖性
-
重要性
-
科学严谨性
-
评价这篇论文

推荐

暂无数据
暂无数据