Prey crypticity reduces the proportion of group members searching for food
Author(s):
MARYSE BARRETTE 1,2 AND LUC-ALAIN GIRALDEAU 2
Groupe de recherche en écologie comportementale et animale (GRECA),
Département des Sciences biologiques, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
1 Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, 430 Gouin blv., St-Jean-sur-Richelieu,
Québec, J3B 3E6; 2 Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, succursale centre-ville, Montréal, Québec, H3P 3P8, Canada.
Cryptic coloration protects against solitary predators but its efficiency against social predators is untested. Social predators are peculiar because they have the option of searching for their own food or exploiting others’ food. Consequently a group is a mixture of food searchers and exploiters. Using flocks of nutmeg mannikins we tested the hypothesis that cryptic coloration increases the predator’s search costs leading to lower proportions of searchers within groups. When we placed clumps of white millet seed on a background that made them cryptic, flocks of mannikins took longer to find the food, made more detection errors and significantly reduced the proportion of birds engaged in searching in three of four flocks. We conclude that
cryptic coloration provides a greater reduction in predation pressure when predators happen to be social because fewer social predators search for cryptic than non-cryptic prey.
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A number of group foragers are known to engage in a producer-scrounger (PS)
foraging game in which only individuals in the producer strategy search for food,
the scroungers wait for opportunities to join. Prey exploited by predators
engaged in a PS game could gain by adopting predator evasion tactics that shift
the PS equilibrium of their predators towards a larger number of non-searching
scroungers. Prey can achieve this by imposing foraging costs that are specific
to predators engaged in the producer strategy. In this study we ask whether prey
cryspsis, a tactic that is demonstrably efficient against solitary predators,
imposes a producer-specific cost to group foragers that shifts PS equilibria
towards more scrounging. We exposed four flocks of six nutmeg mannikins
(Lonchura punctulata), small granivorous passerines that have repeatedly been
documented to play PS foraging games, to clumps of white millet seeds placed
against on one of two backgrounds that either made them cryptic or conspicuous.
We found that foraging under cryptic conditions required more time to find food,
resulted in a greater frequency of detection errors, had no effect on vigilance
but significantly increased the frequency of scroungers at equilibrium in three
of four flocks. Having socially foraging predators may provide prey with an
extra incentive to evolve producer-specific costs such as cryptic coloration.
Keywords: Cryptic prey, producer-scrounger game, social foraging, nutmeg mannikin