Abstract
BackgroundIn group-living animals, social interactions and their effects on other life activities such as foraging are commonly determined by discrimination among group members. Accordingly, many group-living species evolved sophisticated social recognition abilities such as the ability to recognize familiar individuals, i.e. individuals encountered before. Social familiarity may affect within-group interactions and between-group movements. In environments with patchily distributed prey, group-living predators must repeatedly decide whether to stay with the group in a given prey patch or to leave and search for new prey patches and groups.Methodology/Principal FindingsBased on the assumption that in group-living animals social familiarity allows to optimize the performance in other tasks, as for example predicted by limited attention theory, we assessed the influence of social familiarity on prey patch exploitation, patch-leaving, and inter-patch distribution of the group-living, plant-inhabiting predatory mite Phytoseiulus persimilis. P. persimilis is highly specialized on herbivorous spider mite prey such as the two-spotted spider mite Tetranychus urticae, which is patchily distributed on its host plants. We conducted two experiments with (1) groups of juvenile P. persimilis under limited food on interconnected detached leaflets, and (2) groups of adult P. persimilis females under limited food on whole plants. Familiar individuals of both juvenile and adult predator groups were more exploratory and dispersed earlier from a given spider mite patch, occupied more leaves and depleted prey more quickly than individuals of unfamiliar groups. Moreover, familiar juvenile predators had higher survival chances than unfamiliar juveniles.Conclusions/SignificanceWe argue that patch-exploitation and -leaving, and inter-patch dispersion were more favorably coordinated in groups of familiar than unfamiliar predators, alleviating intraspecific competition and improving prey utilization and suppression.
Highlights
Developing explicit foraging strategies for optimal resource exploitation is a major challenge for every animal
In the 1st experiment, we examined these behavioral characteristics in juvenile P. persimilis under limited prey on detached interconnected leaflets
Origin and Rearing of Experimental Animals The individuals used for the experiments were offspring from females withdrawn from a laboratory-reared population of P. persimilis, which had been founded with individuals field-collected in Greece
Summary
Developing explicit foraging strategies for optimal resource exploitation is a major challenge for every animal. The theory predicts the optimal strategy of a single animal without competitors but commonly animals do not forage alone. It assumes that the forager has perfect knowledge about the environment, which is never the case in reality [1,7]. Theories accounting for the presence and influence of other foragers on inter-patch movement and patch occupation are the ideal free and ideal despotic distributions [8,9]. In environments with patchily distributed prey, group-living predators must repeatedly decide whether to stay with the group in a given prey patch or to leave and search for new prey patches and groups
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