Hummingbirds modify their routes to avoid a poor location
Abstract
Traplining, when animals repeat the order in which they visit a number of locations, is taxonomically widespread, but little is known about which factors influence the routes that animals follow. For example, as the quality of rewarding locations changes over time, foragers are expected to update their traplines, either to prioritize locations where the reward increases or to avoid locations that have ceased to be profitable. Here, we tested how traplining wild hummingbirds responded to increases or to decreases in the sucrose concentration of one of the flowers on their trapline. Hummingbirds did not change their trapline to visit the flower with the increased reward first, but by changing the order in which they visited flowers, they avoided a flower that contained a decreased reward. Depending on where along the trapline the reduced-content flower occurred, hummingbirds either changed the origin of their trapline or changed the direction in which they flew around their trapline. It may be that this asymmetric modification of foraging traplines is especially noticeable in risk-averse foragers, such as these territorial hummingbirds.
Citation
Tello-Ramos , M C , Hurly , T A , Barclay , M & Healy , S D 2021 , ' Hummingbirds modify their routes to avoid a poor location ' , Learning and Behavior , vol. First Online . https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-021-00476-3
Publication
Learning and Behavior
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1543-4494Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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