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Browsing by Subject "foraging"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    The ecological context of individual specialization
    (2018-12) Steck, Meredith
    Ecologists often consider conspecific individuals to be ecologically equivalent. However, there can be considerable variation in resource use among individuals from the same local population. Such intraspecific variation can have important ecological consequences for both communities and individuals. Although this pattern of individual specialization has been documented across multiple taxa, less is known about the ecological contexts that promote the development of individual resource specializations. My dissertation addresses this gap by experimentally testing how environmental complexity, resource abundance, resource discriminability, and resource quality affect the development of individual specialization in the cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae). Broadly, my results show that ecological context can shape the challenges animals face while searching for resources and that these challenges influence specialization at the individual level.
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    The Information Economics of Social Interactions
    (2019-02) Heinen, Virginia
    When animals should attend to information is a diverse and fascinating topic, with answers ranging from neurological mechanisms to evolutionary forces. The broad theme of this thesis is examining learning and information use and social interactions from a game theoretical perspective, but I use this framework to address two distinct topics. The first half of my thesis is a fairly traditional investigation hypotheses about animals’ use of social information in uncertain environments, and how social information use fits within the broader interaction of environmental certainty and information reliability. The second half introduces the more novel topic of behavioral conventions, or coordination problems with multiple equilibria, and how topics in behavioral ecology can benefit from a conventions perspective. Through investigating conventions in general, and conventional communication specifically, I develop a novel laboratory system for investigating learned conventional communication.
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    Predator to Prey to Poop: Bats as Microbial Hosts and Insectivorous Hunters
    (2020-09) Galey, Miranda
    Bat fecal samples are a rich source of ecological data for bat biologists, entomologists, and microbiologists. Feces collected from individual bats can be used to profile the gut microbiome using microbial DNA and to understand bat foraging strategies using arthropod DNA. We used eDNA collected from bat fecal samples to better understand bats as predators in the context of their unique gut physiology. We used high through- put sequencing of the COI gene and 16S rRNA gene to determine the diet composition and gut microbiome composition of three bat species in Minnesota: Eptesicus fuscus, Myotis lucifugus and M. septentrionalis. In our analysis of insect prey, we found that E. fuscus consistently foraged for a higher diversity of beetle species compared to other insects. We found that the proportional frequency of tympanate samples from M. septentrionalis and M. lucifugus was similar, while M. septentrionalis consistently preyed more often upon non-flying species. We used the same set of COI sequences to determine presence of pest species, rare species, and insects not previously observed in Minnesota. We were able to combine precise arthropod identification and the for- aging areas of individually sampled bats to observe possible range expansion of some insects. The taxonomic composition of the bat gut microbiome in all three species was found to be consistent with the composition of a mammalian small intestine. The gut community was dominated by microbes that subsist on mucins and simple sugars, mostly in the phyla Proteobacteria and Firmicutes. Lactic acid bacteria were proportionally more abundant than most other groups of bacteria across all host de- mographic variables measured. As high throughput sequencing costs continue to drop and bioinformatic techniques mature, studies such as this will become more valuable for evaluating ecological hypotheses in a holobiontic context. R code used in this thesis are provided in a supplementary PDF.
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    Wild Fruits of Minnesota, A Field Guide
    (2015) Fisk, J. Robert; Hoover, Emily E.