What causes wing wear in foraging bumble bees?

Foster, Danusha J.; Cartar, Ralph V.

doi:10.1242/jeb.051730

Cited by 89 publications

(78 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Large bumblebee workers outperform small workers in nearly every task measured to date (Cnaani and Hefetz, 1994;Goulson et al, 2002;Kapustjanskij et al, 2007; although see Couvillon and Dornhaus, 2010), but spatially complex environments may provide an important context where small body size is favored (Foster and Cartar, 2011). Future work investigating whether the differences in transit time observed here translate to differential resource acquisition rates in cluttered environments would be of particular interest in understanding the ecological implications of our findings.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…Thus, reducing flight velocity could be a strategy for reducing momentum and the potential damage that would result from collisions in larger bees. The need to mitigate damage resulting from collisions has clearly played an important role in shaping insect wing morphology (Foster and Cartar, 2011;Mountcastle and Combes, 2014), but few data exist to directly address the hypothesis that collision damage scales allometrically in insects.…”

Section: Corrective Maneuvers and Flight Performance In Cluttermentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bumblebee flight performance in cluttered environments: effects of obstacle orientation, body size and acceleration

Crall

Ravi

Mountcastle

et al. 2015

Journal of Experimental Biology

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Locomotion through structurally complex environments is fundamental to the life history of most flying animals, and the costs associated with movement through clutter have important consequences for the ecology and evolution of volant taxa. However, few studies have directly investigated how flying animals navigate through cluttered environments, or examined which aspects of flight performance are most critical for this challenging task. Here, we examined how body size, acceleration and obstacle orientation affect the flight of bumblebees in an artificial, cluttered environment. Non-steady flight performance is often predicted to decrease with body size, as a result of a presumed reduction in acceleration capacity, but few empirical tests of this hypothesis have been performed in flying animals. We found that increased body size is associated with impaired flight performance (specifically transit time) in cluttered environments, but not with decreased peak accelerations. In addition, previous studies have shown that flying insects can produce higher accelerations along the lateral body axis, suggesting that if maneuvering is constrained by acceleration capacity, insects should perform better when maneuvering around objects laterally rather than vertically. Our data show that bumblebees do generate higher accelerations in the lateral direction, but we found no difference in their ability to pass through obstacle courses requiring lateral versus vertical maneuvering. In sum, our results suggest that acceleration capacity is not a primary determinant of flight performance in clutter, as is often assumed. Rather than being driven by the scaling of acceleration, we show that the reduced flight performance of larger bees in cluttered environments is driven by the allometry of both path sinuosity and mean flight speed. Specifically, differences in collision-avoidance behavior underlie much of the variation in flight performance across body size, with larger bees negotiating obstacles more cautiously. Thus, our results show that cluttered environments challenge the flight capacity of insects, but in surprising ways that emphasize the importance of behavioral and ecological context for understanding flight performance in complex environments.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 70%

Section: Corrective Maneuvers and Flight Performance In Cluttermentioning

confidence: 99%

Bumblebee flight performance in cluttered environments: effects of obstacle orientation, body size and acceleration

Crall

Ravi

Mountcastle

et al. 2015

Journal of Experimental Biology

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“…Therefore, we suggest that the repeatability in wingbeat frequency is due to individual differences in wing morphology, a fixed trait for the majority of the life of these animals. The substantial wing wear occurring over the lifetime of a bumblebee (Foster and Cartar, 2011) should have an impact on the extent of repeatability of that trait.…”

Section: Determinants Of Individual Flight Energeticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intraspecific variation in flight metabolic rate in the bumblebeeBombus impatiens: repeatability and functional determinants in workers and drones

Darveau

Billardon

Bélanger

2013

Journal of Experimental Biology

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The evolution of flight energetics requires that phenotypes be variable, repeatable and heritable. We studied intraspecific variation in flight energetics in order to assess the repeatability of flight metabolic rate and wingbeat frequency, as well as the functional basis of phenotypic variation in workers and drones of the bumblebee species Bombus impatiens. We showed that flight metabolic rate and wingbeat frequency were highly repeatable in workers, even when controlling for body mass variation using residual analysis. We did not detect significant repeatability in drones, but a smaller range of variation might have prevented us from finding significant values in our sample. Based on our results and previous findings, we associated the high repeatability of flight phenotypes in workers to the functional links between body mass, thorax mass, wing size, wingbeat frequency and metabolic rate. Moreover, differences between workers and drones were as predicted from these functional associations, where drones had larger wings for their size, lower wingbeat frequency and lower flight metabolic rate. We also investigated thoracic muscle metabolic phenotypes by measuring the activity of carbohydrate metabolism enzymes, and we found positive correlations between mass-independent metabolic rate and the activity of all enzymes measured, but in workers only. When comparing workers and drones that differ in flight metabolic rate, only the activity of the enzymes hexokinase and trehalase showed the predicted differences. Overall, our study indicates that there should be correlated evolution among physiological phenotypes at multiple levels of organization and morphological traits associated with flight.

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“…Collective materials Defense swarming Japanese honeybees [574] Material-like swarm Honeybees [573] Magnetic orientation Termites [631] Tree nesting Weaver ants [653] Water active properties Designed wettability Desert beetle [161] Hydrophobic surface Planthopper, [155] mosquitos, [157] green bottle fly [160] Thin flexible membranes Locomotion Locomotive method Mayflies [654] Wing design Bumblebees, [102][103][104][105] dragonflies [94,106,107,112] Mechanosensation Subgenual organs Ground wetas [248,249] Tympanum Cicadas [235] Sound production Tymbal sound production Tiger moths, [269] cicadas [254,266] Thermoregulation Thermosensing Dark-pigmented butterflies [393,655] Water active properties Hydrophobic surface Mosquitos [178] Water-active behavior Termites [177,656] Chemical/other Chemical sensing and defense…”

Section: Physical Adhesive Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…[100] Other flex-lines stay rigid during flight movements, but deform reversibly when the wings contact obstacles to prevent structural damage. [101] A bumblebee is estimated to strike one obstacle per second while foraging for pollen, [102] which means its wings will sustain ≈500 000 collisions over its lifespan of a month. [103][104][105] After splinting the wings to prevent them from bending, researchers observed an order-of-magnitude increase in the rate of wing loss from collisions.…”

Section: Insect Wing Morphology and Compositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature: Functional Materials in Insects

2018

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Over the course of their wildly successful proliferation across the earth, the insects as a taxon have evolved enviable adaptations to their diverse habitats, which include adhesives, locomotor systems, hydrophobic surfaces, and sensors and actuators that transduce mechanical, acoustic, optical, thermal, and chemical signals. Insect‐inspired designs currently appear in a range of contexts, including antireflective coatings, optical displays, and computing algorithms. However, as over one million distinct and highly specialized species of insects have colonized nearly all habitable regions on the planet, they still provide a largely untapped pool of unique problem‐solving strategies. With the intent of providing materials scientists and engineers with a muse for the next generation of bioinspired materials, here, a selection of some of the most spectacular adaptations that insects have evolved is assembled and organized by function. The insects presented display dazzling optical properties as a result of natural photonic crystals, precise hierarchical patterns that span length scales from nanometers to millimeters, and formidable defense mechanisms that deploy an arsenal of chemical weaponry. Successful mimicry of these adaptations may facilitate technological solutions to as wide a range of problems as they solve in the insects that originated them.

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What causes wing wear in foraging bumble bees?

Cited by 89 publications

References 51 publications

Bumblebee flight performance in cluttered environments: effects of obstacle orientation, body size and acceleration

Bumblebee flight performance in cluttered environments: effects of obstacle orientation, body size and acceleration

Intraspecific variation in flight metabolic rate in the bumblebeeBombus impatiens: repeatability and functional determinants in workers and drones

It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature: Functional Materials in Insects

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