These routes are re-adjusted each time a feeding site is depleted and new ones are discovered. This enables them to develop shortcuts between feeding sites and use efficient multi-destination routes (traplines) minimizing overall travel distances. ![]() In particular, studies using radars to monitor the long distance flight paths of bees foraging in the field demonstrate that foragers learn features of their environment to navigate across landscapes and to return to known feeding locations. However, recent behavioural research shows this is not true when animals forage across large spatial scales. Accordingly pollination models relying on these observations typically predict diffusive movements in every direction. įoraging pollinators have long been assumed to move randomly or use hard wired movement rules such as visiting the nearest unvisited flower, exploiting flower patches in straight line movements, navigating inflorescences from bottom to top flowers, or using win-stay lose-leave strategies. In particular, this may help predict and act on complex pollination processes in a context of a looming crisis, when food demand increases and populations of pollinators decline. Understanding how pollinators move, find and choose flowers is thus a key challenge of pollination ecology. When foraging for nectar, animals transfer pollen between flowers, which mediates plant reproduction. Pollinators, such as bees, wasps, flies, butterflies, but also bats and birds, mediate a key ecosystemic service on which most terrestrial plants and animals, including us humans, rely on. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. APE acknowledges funding from a CNRS Momentum grant ( ) and a Fyssen Foundation Research grant ( ). ML was supported by grants of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (3DNaviBee ANR-19-CE37-0024), and the European Commission (FEDER ECONECT MP0021763, ERC Cog BEE-MOVE GA101002644). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.įunding: AM was supported by a PhD Fellowship from the French Government. Received: SeptemAccepted: MaPublished: March 24, 2023Ĭopyright: © 2023 Morán et al. PLoS Comput Biol 19(3):Įditor: Ricardo Martinez-Garcia, Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS), GERMANY Our results indicate that the processes of search and discovery of resources are potentially more complex than usually assumed, and question the importance of resource distribution and abundance on bee foraging success and plant pollination.Ĭitation: Morán A, Lihoreau M, Pérez-Escudero A, Gautrais J (2023) Modeling bee movement shows how a perceptual masking effect can influence flower discovery. At the bee colony level, foragers found more flowers when they were small and at medium densities. At the plant level, flowers distant to the nest were more often discovered by bees in low density environments. ![]() Simulations revealed a « masking effect » that reduces the detection of flowers close to another, with potential far reaching consequences on plant-pollinator interactions. ![]() Our model produces realistic bee trajectories by taking into account the autocorrelation of the bee’s angular speed, the attraction to the nest (homing), and a gaussian noise. Here, we explored the influence of flower size and density on their probability of being discovered by bees by developing a movement model of central place foraging bees, based on experimental data collected on bumblebees. However, experimental work shows this is not always the case. Bees are typically assumed to search for flowers randomly or using simple movement rules, so that the probability of discovering a flower should primarily depend on its distance to the nest. Understanding how pollinators move across space is key to understanding plant mating patterns.
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