Tello-Ramos Maria C, Hurly Andrew T, Healy Susan D
School of Biology, University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK.
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.
Integr Zool. 2019 Mar;14(2):182-192. doi: 10.1111/1749-4877.12370.
Animals that feed from resources that are constant in space and that refill may benefit from repeating the order in which they visit locations. This is a behavior known as traplining, a spatial phenomenon. Hummingbirds, like other central-place foragers, use short traplines when moving between several rewarding sites. Here we investigated whether traplining hummingbirds also use relevant temporal information when choosing which flowers to visit. Wild rufous hummingbirds that were allowed to visit 3 artificial flower patches in which flowers were refilled 20 min after they had been depleted repeated the order in which they visited the 3 patches. Although they tended to visit the first 2 patches sooner than 20 min, they visited the third patch at approximately 20-min intervals. The time between visits to the patches increased across the experiment, suggesting that the birds learned to wait longer before visiting a patch. The birds appeared to couple the sequential pattern of a trapline with temporal regularity, to some degree. This suggests that there is a temporal component to the repeated spatial movements flown by foraging wild hummingbirds.
以空间上恒定且会重新补充的资源为食的动物，可能会从重复访问地点的顺序中受益。这是一种被称为“按固定路线觅食”的行为，是一种空间现象。蜂鸟和其他中心地觅食者一样，在几个有食物的地点之间移动时会采用短的固定路线。在这里，我们研究了按固定路线觅食的蜂鸟在选择访问哪些花朵时是否也会利用相关的时间信息。野生棕煌蜂鸟被允许访问3个人造花丛，花丛中的花朵在被耗尽后20分钟会重新补充，它们会重复访问这3个花丛的顺序。尽管它们倾向于在20分钟之前更快地访问前两个花丛，但它们大约每隔20分钟访问一次第三个花丛。在整个实验过程中，访问花丛之间的时间间隔增加了，这表明鸟类学会了在访问一个花丛之前等待更长时间。这些鸟似乎在一定程度上把固定路线的顺序模式与时间规律联系了起来。这表明，野生觅食蜂鸟重复的空间移动存在时间成分。
