I suppose this falls into the category ‘behaviour’. Does anyone have observations of insects fighting, and/or perhaps know if there is a project that collects them?
Here’s what I mean:
This is a brief animated sequence showing the interaction between a bee, Halictus scabiosae, and a fly I cannot identify (beyond subfamily Empidinae). The bee got too close, and the fly lashed out at the bee. The bee certainly looked startled and took a step back.
The animated gif in the description of this observation includes 56 frames showing two butterflies of the same species arguing. I had noticed them dancing and assumed them to be male and female, until they settled on the bramble leaf and started threatening and hitting each other. I have since observed that this small butterfly can be a right bully; last month I watched one fighting with an Ochlodes sylvanus.
In this instance a Bombus pascuorum had to defend itself kicking the Apis mellifera that wanted the bigger fellow gone from the Cirsium eriophorum.
I don’t know if there is a single project on the topic (you could start one), but there may be projects that encompass specific types of aggression or specific taxa, e.g. mating-related fighting could go in Mating Behaviour.
Sometimes it can be rather difficult to distinguish fighting from mating, or the boundaries between the two are fluid – e.g., male bees may wrestle with each other when trying to access a female, or the female may struggle to shake off an unwelcome suitor. Male bees of some species “patrol” a territory looking for females and chasing away other insects (sometimes they get confused and jump on bees of other species to try to mate with them; this can look a lot like jumping on other bees to drive them away).
Female bees of some species will fight over nesting spots. I managed to capture an Osmia cornuta female evicting a rival from a nesting tube here.
The Bombus-Apis skirmish is interesting. I’ve added it to a project I’m keeping of interspecific bee interactions.
Yes, gifs are accepted beause gifs are pictures, and so are animated gifs.
Animated gifs can be an alternative to video clips. Videos are not accepted, and I don’t blame iNat for not allowing them. One can always post them to Vimeo or YouTube first and link to the clip on those platforms, or link to a video that sits in one’s cloud (but it’s way slower than Vimeo or YouTube).
Edit: Put them in the description, not into the photo section, lest the CV gets confused. I will in fact modify my examples to move the animated gifs to the description for that reason.
Project Mating Behaviour sounds like the place for my “copula”-marked observations! Thanks for the pointer.
I agree with you that it can be hard to tell fighting from mating. The first time I witnessed a bunch of much smaller Colletes males hitting hard on a group of larger females I honestly thought it was a different species attacking them. They obviously have never heard of foreplay. ;-)
That’s the kind of interaction I wouldn’t rule out in a potential project of this kind, just as I would include territorial behaviour of butterflies or inter-species conflicts over feeding spots.
Both bees there may well be the same species; the size difference is likely due to caste (the smaller one is presumably a worker).
It’s a funny thing with the bees – the females I see fighting over the best nesting tubes will happily share a favorite spot to collect mud for lining their nests without any conflict except the occasional aerial collision.
Yeah, bees aren’t particularly subtle. I’ve often thought it must be rather annoying for the females to be regularly accosted by males while they are busy nesting. There are some interesting studies (1, 2) looking at how sexual harrassment by males affects female foraging and offspring production.
Some beetles have rather more sophisticated sex rituals – I’ve seen courting Melyrids a couple times and it seems like a much more relaxed and pleasurable experience for both parties.
I would probably draw a distinction between fighting, per se, which behaviorists would generally classify as a competitive interaction, and predation/attempted predation. Aspects of these interactions can appear similar, but they are pretty fundamentally different.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/227033100
My observation on a pair of beetles. The tree was cut maybe 1 week earlier. The beetles were locked in a struggle for about 2 minutes. Unfortunately, my camera cannot do video. One of the beetles won and the other one ran off.
Crickets engaged in fights sometimes. I thought I saw it once in a patch of grass. Spiders may fight but spiders are not insects. Butterflies can indeed be aggressive towards another butterfly of the same species or another species. It may ram the intruder to its territory.