Noisy communities and signal detection: why do foragers visit rewardless flowers?
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Final Accepted Manuscript
Affiliation
Univ Arizona, Dept Ecol & Evolutionary BiolIssue Date
2020-05-18Keywords
display trait overlapForaging
pollination
probability density function
rewardless flowers
Signal Detection Theory
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ROYAL SOCCitation
Lichtenberg EM, Heiling JM, Bronstein JL, Barker JL. 2020 Noisy communities and signal detection: why do foragers visit rewardless flowers? Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 375: 20190486. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0486Rights
Copyright © 2020 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.Collection Information
This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at repository@u.library.arizona.edu.Abstract
Floral communities present complex and shifting resource landscapes for flower-foraging animals. Strong similarities among the floral displays of different plant species, paired with high variability in reward distributions across time and space, can weaken correlations between floral signals and reward status. As a result, it should be difficult for foragers to discriminate between rewarding and rewardless flowers. Building on signal detection theory in behavioural ecology, we use hypothetical probability density functions to examine graphically how plant signals pose challenges to forager decision-making. We argue that foraging costs associated with incorrect acceptance of rewardless flowers and incorrect rejection of rewarding ones interact with community-level reward availability to determine the extent to which rewardless and rewarding species should overlap in flowering time. We discuss the evolutionary consequences of these phenomena from both the forager and the plant perspectives. This article is part of the theme issue 'Signal detection theory in recognition systems: from evolving models to experimental tests'.Note
12 month embargo; published online: 18 May 2020ISSN
0962-8436PubMed ID
32420846Version
Final accepted manuscriptae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1098/rstb.2019.0486
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