Specialization and accuracy of host-searching butterflies in complex and simple environments

Meredith K Steck, Emilie C Snell-Rood and Dan PapajHandling Editor

Behavioral Ecology, 2018, vol. 29, issue 2, 486-495

Abstract: When animals search for resources, they often make more accurate decisions when they specialize on a subset of available resources. This strategy might be particularly useful in complex environments where there is an overwhelming amount of information to process. In our population of butterflies, although certain specialized individuals (those that visited a resource that was easy to find) were more accurate than individuals that visited all available resources, other specialized individuals were not associated with accurate decision-making. Furthermore, butterflies searching for resources in complex environments did not adopt a more specialized search strategy than butterflies in simple environments.

Keywords: individual specialization; information processing; complexity; foraging; host preference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/ary001 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:29:y:2018:i:2:p:486-495.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().