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Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on July 31, 2006
Behavioral Ecology 2006 17(6):905-910; doi:10.1093/beheco/arl024
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Models of optimal foraging and resource partitioning: deep corollas for long tongues

Miguel A. Rodríguez-Gironésa and Luis Santamaríab

a Estación Experimental de Zonas Áridas (CSIC), General Segura 1, 04001 Almeria, Spain b Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (IMEDEA, CSIC-UIB), Miquel Marquès 21, 07190 Esporles, Mallorca, Spain

Address correspondence to M.A. Rodríguez-Gironés. E-mail: rgirones{at}eeza.csic.es.

We model the optimal foraging strategies for 2 nectarivore species, differing in the length of their proboscis, that exploit the nectar provided by 2 types of flowers, differing in the depths of their corollas. When like flowers appear in clumps, nectarivores must decide whether to forage at a patch of deep or shallow flowers. If nectarivores forage optimally, at least one flower type will be used by a single nectarivore species. Long-tongued foragers will normally visit deep flowers and short-tongued foragers shallow flowers, although extreme asymmetries in metabolic costs may lead to the opposite arrangement. When deep and shallow flowers are randomly interspersed, nectarivores must decide, on encounter with a flower, whether to collect its nectar or continue searching. At low nectarivore densities, the optimal strategy involves exploiting every encountered flower; however, as nectarivore densities increase and resources become scarce, long-tongued individuals should start concentrating on deep flowers and short-tongued individuals on shallow flowers. Therefore, regardless of the spatial distribution of flowers, corolla depth can determine which nectarivore species exploit the nectar from each flower type in a given community. It follows that corolla elongation can evolve as a means to keep nectar thieves at bay if short-tongued visitors are less efficient pollinators than long-tongued visitors.

Key words: competition, habitat selection, nectar concealment.


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