Zooplankton encounters in patchy particle distributions

Zooplankton encounter rates are dependent not only on both sensory and swimming performances of the organisms, but also on the distribution pattern of food particles. Increasing evidences indicate that, in natural conditions, phytoplankton is often aggregated in thin layers. In the present contribution we investigate the concomitant effects of motion complexity and habitat fragmentation on the number of encounters realised by virtual continuously moving copepods adopting different motion strategies. Our simulated organisms move in an environment characterised by the presence of thin patches of phytoplankton, and their swim follows five motion rules (pure random walk, correlated random walk with three different time scales, self-avoiding random walk), each characterised by a typical value of the three-dimensional fractal dimension D_3D. Compared to a uniform distribution, for a given motion rule the clustering of prey particles increases the variance of encounters, while no remarkable effect is reported in the average number of particles intercepted. These results broaden our understanding of the behavioural efficiency in freely swimming zooplankters and improve our knowledge of the functioning of aquatic systems.     

How resources and encounters affect the distribution of foraging activity in a seed-harvesting ant

We examined how the foraging ecology of the seed-harvesting ant Messor andrei depends upon the distribution of resources and the presence of conspecifics. Bait experiments showed that colonies can recruit to high-density patches of seeds. However, at the seasonal scale, natural resource distribution did not affect the distribution of foraging activity. We conducted the study in years of high rainfall and thus seed availability may not have been a limiting factor. Colonies always preferred to forage in areas closer to their nest, which may reduce travel time between the nest and foraging sites. On a day-to-day scale, encounters between neighboring colonies at a site increased the probability that colonies would return to forage at that site; this was true both for natural and experimental encounters. In the summer, this resulted in colonies foraging at the sites of intraspecific encounters on more days than in areas where no encounter had occurred. Encounters between colonies included fighting, and there was little overlap between the foraging areas of neighboring colonies: both results suggest that one function of encounters is to defend foraging space. The high probability of return to the site of an encounter between colonies suggests that encounters may have a second function: to indicate the presence of resources. Received: 28 June 1999 / Received in revised form: 12 October 1999 / Accepted: 16 October 1999