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Carry-over effects of bumblebee associative learning in changing plant communities leads to increased costs of foraging

Internicola, Antonina ; Page, Paul ; Bernasconi, Giorgina ; Gigord, Luc

In: Arthropod-Plant Interactions, 2009, vol. 3, no. 1, p. 17-26

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    Title
    • Carry-over effects of bumblebee associative learning in changing plant communities leads to increased costs of foraging
    Author
    • Internicola, Antonina. Department of Ecology and Evolution, Biophore, University of Lausanne, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland
    • Page, Paul. Institute for Integrative Biology, ETH Zürich, Universitätsstrasse 16, 8092, Zürich, Switzerland
    • Bernasconi, Giorgina. Institute of Biology, University of Neuchâtel, Rue Emile-Argand 11, 2009, Neuchâtel, Switzerland
    • Gigord, Luc. Department of Ecology and Evolution, Biophore, University of Lausanne, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland
    Document Type
    • Postprint
    OAI-PMH Identifier
    • oai:doc.rero.ch:318622
    Summary
    Flower visitors learn to avoid food-deceptive plants and to prefer rewarding ones by associating floral cues to rewards. As co-occurring plant species have different phenologies, cue-reward associations vary over time. It is not known how these variations affect flower visitors' foraging costs and learning. We trained bumblebees of two colonies to forage in a community of deceptive and rewarding artificial inflorescences whose flower colours were either similar or dissimilar. We then modified the community composition by turning the rewarding inflorescences into unrewarding and adding rewarding inflorescences of a novel flower colour. In the short term, bees trained to similar rather than dissimilar inflorescences experienced higher costs of foraging (decreased foraging speed and accuracy) in the novel community. The colonies differed in their speed-accuracy trade-off. In the longer term, bees adapted their foraging behaviour to the novel community composition by increasingly visiting the novel rewarding inflorescences