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Antlion Foraging: Tracking Prey Across Space And Time
Ecology, Oct, 1999 by Philip H. Crowley, Mary C. Linton
In the SBD-NL system, there were clear differences in prey availability between the sites at Good Harbor Bay and Sleeping Bear Bay, and among the site-year data sets. These and other differences generated some variation among the best foraging strategies for these cases. Because the two sites are physically similar and only [approximately]15 km apart along the lakeshore, it seems unlikely that the populations at these sites differ genetically in characteristics that would influence foraging behavior. Perhaps comparisons of genetically isolated populations would reveal adaptations in which foraging behavior becomes genetically tuned to the local environment. In any case, comparative studies across populations differing in the mean and variance of prey abundance and in the scales of spatial and temporal autocorrelation would allow the approach taken here to be tested, improved, and extended.
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In the laboratory, antlions may be induced to adopt a foraging strategy consistent with the spatiotemporal distribution of prey offered to them. In a 30-d experiment, we recently showed that larvae would move their pits initially every few days and then less often to exploit fine-scale differences in prey availability within containers 40 cm in diameter (Linton et al. 1991). The situation that we posed for them had small-scale spatial, but large-scale temporal, autocorrelation in prey availability, and their foraging strategies generally fit the characteristics in the lower-left box of Fig. 1. It may be typical of such situations that the relocation frequency starts very high and then declines, as we observed, particularly when a location with a consistently high gain rate can be found.
We note that antlion larvae observed in the laboratory cannot automatically be assumed to have useful information at the beginning of the observation period about the spatiotemporal characteristics of the foraging problem posed for them, unlike those observed for some arbitrary interval in the field. This may help to explain the greater initial movement frequency in the previous laboratory study. In any case, there is clearly much scope for additional laboratory studies to provide new insight into how foraging strategies respond to patterns of prey availability.
Conceptualizing foraging problems as finding how best to move simultaneously along spatial and temporal axes may prove useful in a wide variety of biological systems. Perhaps the systems best studied in this way to date are insect pollinators and flowers (Pyke 1979, Waddington and Heinrich 1979) and the seasonal migrations of large herds of grazing mammals (Baker 1978). Plant systems can sometimes be viewed in a similar way, particularly clonal plants that extend stolons to initiate new ramets (Slade and Hutchings 1987a, b). However, these cases are complicated by exploitation-regeneration dynamics of the resources, whereas the prey resources of trap-building predators can generally be considered renewable and non-exploitable. The relatively simple dynamics of the trap-builder systems may increase our chances of eventually understanding them in depth.
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