How do animals forage for variable food resources? For animals foraging at flowers, floral constancy has provided a framework for understanding why organisms visit some flowers while bypassing others. We extend this framework to the flower-handling tactics that visitors employ. Nectar robbers remove nectar through holes bitten in flowers, often without pollinating. Many foragers can switch between robbing and visiting flowers legitimately to gain access to nectar. We document that even though individuals can switch foraging tactics, they often do not. We explore whether individuals exhibit constancy to either robbing or visiting legitimately, which we term tactic constancy. We then extend hypotheses of floral constancy to understand when and why visitors exhibit tactic constancy and raise questions for future research.

动物如何觅食可变的食物资源？对于在花朵上觅食的动物而言，恒定的花朵为理解生物为何绕开某些花朵而访问某些花朵提供了一个框架。我们将此框架扩展到访客采用的鲜花处理策略。花蜜强盗通常通过没有花授粉的方式从花中咬入的孔中去除花蜜。许多觅食者可以合法地在抢劫和赏花之间切换，以获取花蜜。我们记录到，即使个人可以切换觅食策略，但他们通常不会。我们探讨了个人是否表现出对抢劫或合法探望的持续性，我们称之为战术持续性。然后，我们扩展了花卉恒定性的假设，以了解访客何时以及为何表现出战术恒定性，并对未来的研究提出疑问。