PREDATOR FORAGING BEHAVIOR IN RESPONSE TO PERCEPTION AND LEARNING BY ITS PREY - INTERACTIONS BETWEEN ORB-SPINNING SPIDERS AND STINGLESS BEES

Although rewarded bees learn and remember colors and patterns, they ha ve difficulty in learning to avoid negative stimuli such as decorated spider webs spun by Argiope argentata. A. argentata decorates its web with silk patterns that vary unpredictably (Fig. 1) and thus foraging insects that return to sites where spiders are found encounter new vis ual cues daily. Stingless bees can learn to avoid spider webs but avoi dance-learning is slowed or inhibited by daily variation in web decora tions (Figs. 3,4; Tables 1,2). In addition, even if bees learn to avoi d decorated webs found in one location, they are unable to generalize learned-avoidance responses to similarly decorated webs found at other sites. A. argentata seems to have evolved a foraging behavior that is tied to the ways insects perceive and process information about their environment. Because of the evolutionary importance of bee-flower int erdependence, the predatory behavior of web-decorating spiders may be difficult for natural selection to act against.