Publications des scientifiques de l'IRD

Requier Fabrice, Henry M., Decourtye A., Brun F., Aupinel P., Rebaudo François, Bretagnolle V. (2020). Measuring ontogenetic shifts in central-place foragers : a case study with honeybees. Journal of Animal Ecology, 89 (8), 1860-1871. ISSN 0021-8790.

Titre du document
Measuring ontogenetic shifts in central-place foragers : a case study with honeybees
Année de publication
2020
Type de document
Article référencé dans le Web of Science WOS:000536518900001
Auteurs
Requier Fabrice, Henry M., Decourtye A., Brun F., Aupinel P., Rebaudo François, Bretagnolle V.
Source
Journal of Animal Ecology, 2020, 89 (8), 1860-1871 ISSN 0021-8790
Measuring time-activity budgets over the complete individual life span is now possible for many animals with the recent advances of life-long individual monitoring devices. Although analyses of changes in the patterns of time-activity budgets have revealed ontogenetic shifts in birds or mammals, no such technique has been applied to date on insects. We tested an automated breakpoint-based procedure to detect, assess and quantify shifts in the temporal pattern of the flight activities in honeybees. We assumed that the learning and foraging stages of honeybees will differ in several respects, to detect the age at onset of foraging (AOF). Using an extensive dataset covering the life-long monitoring of 1,167 individuals, we compared the AOF outputs with the more conventional approaches based on arbitrary thresholds. We further evaluated the robustness of the different methods comparing the foraging time-activity budget allocations between the presumed foragers and confirmed foragers. We revealed a clear-cut learning-foraging ontogenetic shift that differs in duration, frequency and time of occurrence of flights. Although AOF appeared to be highly plastic among bees, the breakpoint-based procedure seems better capable to detect it than arbitrary threshold-based methods that are unable to deal with inter-individual variation. We developed the aof r-package including a broad range of examples with both simulated and empirical datasets to illustrate the simplicity of use of the procedure. This simple procedure is generic enough to be derived from any individual life-long monitoring devices recording the time-activity budgets, and could propose new ecological applications of bio-logging to detect ontogenetic shifts in the behaviour of central-place foragers.
Plan de classement
Sciences du monde animal [080]
Localisation
Fonds IRD [F B010078107]
Identifiant IRD
fdi:010078107
Contact