Animal Behavior in a Functional Community-Ecology Context
Behavioral plasticity can be a key driver of network dynamics (adaptive foraging, re-wiring) and ecological functioning (e.g. pollinator behavior as a driver of pollination functioning). We are interested in a range of fundamental topics in behavior that affect these relationships, including intraspecific variation in behavior (a key research interest of Donna) and social information. We have developed a completely computer-controlled foraging enclosure, with artificial flowers whose rewards are triggered by tiny radio-frequency ID (RFID) tags that allows for nearly complete control of foraging rewards, allowing for powerful experimental approaches in behavior.
Key Papers
This paper integrates modeling and our field data from Colorado, and shows that “adaptive foraging”—behavioral plasticity in foraging intensity on different resources—is key for stabilizing pollination networks, but has different effects in networks with different structures.
This review lays out why foraging choices in pollinators, at multiple scales, can drive important system properties including diversity-functioning relationships.
Trapline foraging is a key behavioral tactic used by pollinators and many other groups of animals. This work develops a new method for measuring traplining—which has been notoriously challenging to quantify—borrowing quantitative tools from statistical physics.
Most biodiversity-functioning relationships predict relatively rapid saturation of functioning with diversity. In this work we showed that removing even a single species can have negative functional consequences, driven by behavioral plasticity in the remaining species.
Projects
Diversity Effects on Functional Behavior
Former graduate student Dr. Carolyn Ayers led work using our unique foraging experimental setup to investigate the effects of bee diversity on functionally relevant behaviors (in other words, behaviorally-driven biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships). She followed this up with a study on how sublethal pesticide exposure affects diversity – functioning relationships, with support from the National Science Foundation. Both of these papers will be submitted shortly.
Social vs. Personal Information Use in Hehavior
Driven largely by Donna McDermott, we have recently begun collaborating with Emory colleagues Michal Arbilly (Biology) and Ilya Nemenman and David Hofmann (Physics) to integrate mathematically rigorous information theory and foraging ecology, with a focus on gathering of personal vs. social information and the role of individual behavioral differences in the use of information from different sources. This work combines theory and experiments using our foraging enclosure.