Predator avoidance and foraging often pose conflicting demands. Animals can decrease mortality risk searching for predators, but searching decreases foraging time and hence intake. We used this principle to investigate how prey should use information to detect, assess and respond to predation risk from an optimal foraging perspective. A mathematical model showed that solitary bees should increa...

Animals collecting resources that replenish over time often visit patches in predictable sequences called traplines. Despite the widespread nature of this strategy, we still know little about how spatial memory develops and guides individuals toward suitable routes. Here, we investigate whether flower visitation sequences by bumblebees Bombus terrestris simply reflect the order in which flowers...

Illusory correlation experiments indicate that people overestimate the association between random presentations of snake slides and shock, but do not overestimate the association between random presentations of slides of damaged and exposed electric outlets (DEEOs) and shock. To investigate whether reports of covariation biases might be attributable to expectancy biases, we had Ss rate the a pr...

Bees were conditioned to collect food on natural and artificial flower beds, parts of which could be set into rotation or side to side movement. Through the relative motion of the flowers the number of alternating stimuli upon the bee's eye is increased. Due to the fact that bees show a strong reaction to intermittent optical stimulation, the proportion of bees settling on the moving section of...

Large-scale controllable fabrication of highly roughened flower-like silver nanostructures is demonstrated experimentally via electrodeposition in the liquid crystalline phase. Different sizes of silver flowers are fabricated by adjusting the deposition time and the concentration of the silver nitrate solution. The density of the silver flowers in the sample is also controllable in this work. T...

Animals exploiting their familiar food items often avoid spatio-temporal aggregation with others by avoiding scents, less rewarding areas or visual contacts, thereby minimizing competition or interference when resources are replenished slowly in patches. When animals are searching or assessing available food sources, however, they may benefit from reducing sampling costs by following others at ...

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather ...

Animals organize their lives around circannual and circadian rhythms, but little is known of their use of much shorter intervals. In the laboratory, some animals can learn the specific duration (seconds or minutes) between periods of food access. It has been supposed that wild nectarivores, such as hummingbirds, might also learn short time intervals so as to avoid revisiting emptied flowers unt...

Inconspicuous prey pay a cost of reduced feeding opportunities. Flowers are highly nutritious but are positioned where prey would be apparent to predators and often contain toxins to reduce consumption. However, many herbivores are specialized to subvert these defenses by retaining toxins for their own use. Here, we present a model of the growth and life history of a small herbivore that can fe...

The heuristic value of drawings in research is emphasized, based on a drawing of flowers of Eupomatia bennettii.