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The Scientific Naturalist: Flower visitor insects display an interspecific dominance hierarchy on flowers
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Edité par CCSD ; Ecological Society of America -
International audience. A few minutes of observation of flowers are sufficient to notice that some flower-visiting insects threaten, harass, or attack individuals from other species. Flies dive-bomb butterflies, and wild bees of different species wrestle one another. One of us (MR-B) has observed this phenomenon repeatedly over the course of at least 20 years in a garden in Michigan, USA (Figure 1). Yet, interspecific agonistic behaviors between flower visitors on flowers are not documented in the literature.