Forums | HES 健康与环境科学

15 April 2024, 9:51 AM

Speaker: Agnishikhe Munipapa Reddy Ashok Kumar

Date: 2024-04-18

Time: 13:00-13:30 

Room: ES354

Online link:

https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/v169BGHYrPM6

Meeting ID: 668-4466-7997

Title: Effect of Island area on information production in mobbing

Abstract:

Mobbing is an anti-predatory strategy where species, on encountering a perching predator, elicit mobbing calls and recruit heterospecifics to evade the predator. The ‘Altering others’ hypothesis indicates the importance of communicating in order to recruit other prey including heterospecifics for successful mobbing. Information (about threats) can be obtained by direct signals such as predator detection or indirect signals such as relying on conspecific or heterospecific mobbing alarm calls. As direct signals are costly, emphasis is laid on acquiring intra/interspecific information as a necessary component of mobbing. Hence, information production and flow are important for effective mobbing. Several hypotheses also suggest information production and flow increases with species diversity as a result of the ‘sampling effect’ (where keystone species are more likely to occur in species-rich communities) or as more species are available to produce either diverse information or repetitive but reliable information. However, these hypotheses are not empirically tested. Therefore, in this study, I will test the relationship between species diversity and information production in mobbing using island area as a proxy for species diversity.