Trading off short-term costs for long-term gains: how do bumblebees decide to learn morphologically complex flowers?
@article{Muth2015TradingOS, title={Trading off short-term costs for long-term gains: how do bumblebees decide to learn morphologically complex flowers?}, author={Felicity Muth and Tamar Keasar and Anna R. Dornhaus}, journal={Animal Behaviour}, year={2015}, volume={101}, pages={191-199} }
16 Citations
Learning about larceny: experience can bias bumble bees to rob nectar
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Investigating whether the tendency to rob nectar through previously-made holes (secondary robbing) is influenced by prior foraging experience found that experience did affect bees’ tendency to secondary-rob: trained bees were more likely to adopt the tactic they had previously experienced, contributing to the understanding of nectar robbing from the animals’ perspective.
Effect of flower perceptibility on spatial-reward associative learning by bumble bees
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Bumble bees learn the location of high-rewarding flowers depending on the cost–benefit balance of learning, irrespective of the opportunity or their aptitude for learning, suggesting that learning might be a choice that foragers can apply according to the circumstances.
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- BiologyFrontiers in Ecology and Evolution
- 2021
The results suggest that successful foraging on complex flowers, especially when highly rewarding, can indeed induce insect pollinators to attempt additional flower species with other complex shapes.
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B Bees showed surprisingly suboptimal tracking, not reliably choosing the currently best resource except when the fluctuating resource was very persistent and the potential rewards high, indicating that they measured environmental persistence and reacted to it as predicted by theory.
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Morphological Complexity as a Floral Signal: From Perception by Insect Pollinators to Co-Evolutionary Implications
- BiologyInternational journal of molecular sciences
- 2018
Cognitive mechanisms that potentially allow insects to persist on complex flowers despite low initial foraging gains are discussed, experiments to test these mechanisms are suggested, and their adaptive value is speculated on.
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- 2019
This thesis examined the adaptive value of visual associative learning in the bumblebee Bombus impatiens by quantifying variation in performance across four laboratory colour-learning tasks for wild and domesticated colonies and by assessing the field foraging performance of individuals relative to their learning ability.
Prospective Learning: Back to the Future
- Computer ScienceArXiv
- 2022
It is argued that a paradigm shift from retrospective to prospective learning will enable the communities that study intelligence to unite and overcome existing bottlenecks to more effectively explain, augment, and engineer intelligences.
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