Marine turtles in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area : a compendium of information and basis for the development of policies and strategies for the conservation of marine turtles

The objective of this document is to provide a basis for managing human activities that will, or are likely to, affect the turtle populations occurring in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area so as to ensure their conservation and, where necessary, recovery

A glass half empty: Assessing the impact of empty flowers on foraging behaviour in three bee species

Flower-visiting insects face the difficult choice of selecting which flowers to visit and which to ignore. Foraging becomes more complicated because flowers can sometimes stop offering nectar, either due to removal by other visitors or because of physiological changes in the plant. In humans, items that are unexpectedly unavailable at the time of choice are called ‘phantom decoys’ and have been shown to influence preference relationships between other items in the choice set. If phantom decoys occur in pollinating insects, then the presence of empty flowers could have community-wide impacts on visitation rates of neighbouring flowers. In my first chapter, we tested if European honeybees Apis mellifera were susceptible to phantom decoy-style empty flowers. We then tested the effects of empty flowers on Bombus impatiens when they were influenced by the choices of their conspecifics. Finally, we tested if stingless bees, Tetragonula carbonaria made use of floral colour generalisations to choose flowers when the best flower in the choice set had its nectar removed. Overall, while we saw minimal impacts on floral choice by empty flowers, we did show that social behaviour is a key driver in allowing bees to make effective foraging decisions in the presence of empty flowers, and empty flowers can result in the abandonment of patches

Oceanus.

v. 28, no. 1 (1985

Oceanus.

v. 31, no. 2 (1988