Abstract
Optimal foraging models predict how an organism allocates its time and energy while foraging for aggregated resources. These models have been successfully applied to organisms such as predators looking for prey, female parasitoids looking for hosts, or herbivorous searching for food. In this study, information use and patch time allocation were investigated using male parasitoids looking for mates. The influence of the former presence of females in absence of mates and the occurrence of mating and other reproductive behaviours on the patch leaving tendency was investigated for the larval parasitoid Asobara tabida. Although males do not modify their patch residence time based on the number of females that visited the patch, they do show an increase in the patch residence time after mating a virgin female and performing courtship behaviour such as opening their wings. These results are in concordance with an incremental mechanism, as it has been described for females of the same species while foraging for hosts. The similarities between males and females of the same species, and the conditions under which such a patch-leaving decision rule is fitted are discussed. This is the first study describing an incremental effect of mating on patch residence time in males, thus suggesting that similar information use are probably driving different organisms foraging for resource, regardless of its nature.
Highlights
Optimal foraging models predict how organisms should behave in order to maximise their lifetime fitness gain when foraging for resources [1,2]
Neither the number of females that previously visited the patch, nor any of the tested events significantly influenced the patchleaving tendency for males (Table 1); the time spent on the patch is independent of the number of females that previously visited the patch and the performed behaviour in absence of females
Influence of mating on patch residence time While mating with a virgin female significantly decreased the patch leaving tendency by a factor of 3.959, re-mating an already mated female had no effect on the patch leaving tendency (Table 2)
Summary
Optimal foraging models predict how organisms should behave in order to maximise their lifetime fitness gain when foraging for resources (e.g. food, hosts or sexual partners) [1,2]. When facing a resource of variable quality aggregated in patches of different sizes, organisms are expected to adjust their residence time to the patch quality to maximise their resource intake rate as predicted by Charnov’s Marginal Value Theorem [3]: the higher the patch quality, the longer the residence time This adaptive foraging behaviour was observed in a wide range of taxa such as insects, birds, rodents, cattle or humans [4,5,6,7,8]. McNamara and Houston [16] pointed out recently the importance of studying the evolution of these mechanisms in relation with the complexity of the environment and state that behavioural ecologists have to consider the internal state of the forager in order to understand how evolution and environment shaped the behaviour Some of these patch-departure decision rules are based on the motivation (or responsiveness) to stay in the patch. Even if it is a hidden and not directly observable variable [21], a variety of animals (e.g. parasitoids, bumblebees, human) with different cognitive abilities were shown to make their decision to leave a patch in manners consistent with motivation models (e.g. [7,22])
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