TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ruedenauer, Fabian A.
A1  - Raubenheimer, David
A1  - Kessner-Beierlein, Daniela
A1  - Grund-Mueller, Nils
A1  - Noack, Lisa
A1  - Spaethe, Johannes
A1  - Leonhardt, Sara D.
T1  - Best be(e) on low fat: linking nutrient perception, regulation and fitness
JF  - Ecology Letters
N2  - Preventing malnutrition through consuming nutritionally appropriate resources represents a challenge for foraging animals. This is due to often high variation in the nutritional quality of available resources. Foragers consequently need to evaluate different food sources. However, even the same food source can provide a plethora of nutritional and non‐nutritional cues, which could serve for quality assessment. We show that bumblebees, Bombus terrestris , overcome this challenge by relying on lipids as nutritional cue when selecting pollen. The bees ‘prioritised’ lipid perception in learning experiments and avoided lipid consumption in feeding experiments, which supported survival and reproduction. In contrast, survival and reproduction were severely reduced by increased lipid contents. Our study highlights the importance of fat regulation for pollen foraging bumblebees. It also reveals that nutrient perception, nutrient regulation and reproductive fitness can be linked, which represents an effective strategy enabling quick foraging decisions that prevent malnutrition and maximise fitness.
KW  - bee decline
KW  - foraging
KW  - nutrition
KW  - plant-insect interactions
KW  - pollen quality
KW  - PER
KW  - resource use
Y1  - 2020
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-208709
VL  - 23
IS  - 3
ER  -