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Prey Size, Prey Perishability and Group Foraging in a Social Spider by Ann L. Rypstra; R. Scott Tirey is a Environmental Science article available to read on EtoBox.

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Selection might favor group foraging and social feeding when prey are distributed in patches that do not last long enough for a solitary individual to consume more than a small fraction of them (Pulliam and Millikan 1982; Pulliam and Caraco 1984). Here we considered the foraging behavior of a social spider, Anelosimus eximius, in light of this ephemeral resource hypothesis. This species builds large webs in which members cooperate to capture a wide variety of different sizes and types of prey, many of which are very large. The capture success of this species was very high across all prey sizes, presumably due to the fact that they foraged in groups. Group consumption times in natural colonies for all prey larger than five mm were less than the time that dead insects remained on the plastic sheets that we used as artificial webs. Solitary consumption estimates, calculated from the rate at which laboratory individuals extracted insect biomass while feeding, were the same as the residence times of insects on artificial webs in the field for insects between 6 and 15 mm in length and were significantly longer than the persistence of insects on plastic sheets for all larger insects. Larg

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Author

Ann L. Rypstra; R. Scott Tirey

Publisher

Springer-Verlag; Springer Verlag; Springer Science and Business Media LLC (ISSN 0029-8549)

Published

1991

Language

EN

Field

Environmental Science (Physical Sciences)