Animals often change their behaviour in the presence of other species and the environmental context they experience, and these changes can substantially modify the course their populations follow. In the case of animals involved in mutualistic interactions, it is still unclear how to incorporate the effects of these behavioural changes into population dynamics. We propose a framework for using pollinator functional responses to examine the roles of pollinator–pollinator interactions and abiotic conditions in altering the times between floral visits of a focal pollinator. We then apply this framework to a unique foraging experiment with different models that allow resource availability and sublethal exposure to a neonicotinoid pesticide to modify how pollinators forage alone and with co-foragers. We found that all co-foragers interfere with the focal pollinator under at least one set of abiotic conditions; for most species, interference was strongest at higher levels of resource availability and with pesticide exposure. Overall our results highlight that density-dependent responses are often context-dependent themselves.

中文翻译：

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传粉者干扰的背景依赖性：环境条件和共同觅食物种如何影响花卉访问

动物经常在其他物种的存在和它们所经历的环境背景下改变它们的行为，这些变化可以大大改变它们的种群遵循的过程。对于参与互惠互动的动物，目前尚不清楚如何将这些行为变化的影响纳入种群动态。我们提出了一个框架，用于使用传粉媒介功能反应来检查传粉媒介 - 传粉媒介相互作用和非生物条件在改变焦点传粉媒介花期之间的时间方面的作用。然后，我们将此框架应用于具有不同模型的独特觅食实验，这些模型允许资源可用性和对新烟碱类杀虫剂的亚致死暴露，以改变传粉媒介单独和与共同觅食者一起觅食的方式。我们发现所有共同觅食者都在至少一组非生物条件下干扰焦点传粉者；对于大多数物种，在较高的资源可用性水平和接触农药时干扰最强。总的来说，我们的结果强调了密度相关的反应本身通常是依赖于上下文的。