The context dependency of pollinator interference: How environmental conditions and co-foraging species impact floral visitation

Animals often change their behaviour in the presence of other species and the environmental context they experience, and these changes can substantially modify the course their populations follow. In the case of animals involved in mutualistic interactions, it is still unclear how to incorporate the effects of these behavioural changes into population dynamics. We propose a framework for using pollinator functional responses to examine the roles of pollinator-pollinator interactions and abiotic conditions in altering the times between floral visits of a focal pollinator. We then apply this framework to a unique foraging experiment with different models that allow resource availability and sublethal exposure to a neonicotinoid pesticide to modify how pollinators forage alone and with co-foragers. We found that all co-foragers interfere with the focal pollinator under at least one set of abiotic conditions; for most species, interference was strongest at higher levels of resource availability and with pesticide exposure. Overall our results highlight that density-dependent responses are often context-dependent themselves.

Automated summary

Animals change their behavior in the presence of other species and the environment, impacting population dynamics. A framework using pollinator functional responses was proposed to examine how behavioral changes influence the interactions between pollinators and the environment. The study found that co-foragers interfere with the focal pollinator, with interference being strongest at higher resource levels and pesticide exposure.