Body Size and Its Relation to the Foraging Schedules of Social Wasps
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ECOLOGY, BEHAVIOR AND BIONOMICS
Body Size and Its Relation to the Foraging Schedules of Social Wasps ELS BRITO1,2 , CA SÁ1, GMM SANTOS1 1
Programa de pós-graduação em Ecologia e Evolução, Depto de Ciências Biológicas, Lab de Entomologia, Univ Estadual de Feira de Santana, Feira de Santana, Brasil 2 Programa de pós-graduação em Ecologia e Evolução, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Lab de Interações Ecológicas – LIEB, Univ Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, Brasil
Keywords Insects, foraging behavior, interspecific variation, daily pattern, guild structure, temporal complementarity Correspondence ELS Brito, Programa de pós-graduação em Ecologia e Evolução, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Lab de Interações Ecológicas – LIEB, Univ Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, Brasil; [email protected] Edited by Heraldo Vasconcelos – UFU Received 11 November 2019 and accepted 26 May 2020 * Sociedade Entomológica do Brasil 2020
Abstract The foraging behavior of social wasps may vary throughout the day in response to different factors, including environmental variation and interspecific interactions. Body size is known to play a critical role in determining daily activity patterns in ecological communities. However, the body size characteristics of most species of social wasps is poorly known, as well the relationship between body size and foraging schedules. In this study, we evaluated the extent to which body size determines the patterns of daily activity in a community of social wasps. We found a high temporal overlap in most of the species pairs tested. The pattern of daily foraging activity fits a bimodal distribution for the majority of the species. Moreover, we found a relationship between body and foraging time; in general, smaller species tended to begin foraging in the early hours of the morning, in contrast to larger wasps, which began foraging later. These results suggest that patterns of foraging activity in social wasps are likely to be the result of complex interactions between many different factors, including body size.
Introduction The pattern in the daily activity of a species is defined as the temporal distribution of the behavior of individuals of that species over 24 h (Daan 1981, Moore-Ede et al 1982). Environmental conditions can impose restrictions on insects that navigate visually, thereby limiting their daily activity schedule (Wehner 1976, Hilário et al 2000). Extremes in temperature have also often been associated with restricted foraging time in some groups of insects (Marsh 1985, KleinertGiovannini and Imperatriz-Fonseca 1986, Kasper et al 2008). Therefore, patterns in behavior are generally associated with daily environmental variation, although other factors may also influence the daily activity pattern of coexisting species, such as niche partitioning or competition (e.g., Carlander & Cleary 1949, Cerdá et al 1998, Brito et al 2012). Daily activity patterns may be molded by physiological factors, such as whether insects are ectothermic or endothermic, or morphological constraints; for example, redu
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