Wondering if somebody has quantitative data for observations on ants attacking herbivores and/or pollinators (as # observations/period of time) without any sort of manipulation. In other words, a person sits, observes, and records a natural predation event involving insects. There is interesting research on predation by (e.g.) spiders or ants, but it seems obvious that conclusions are mostly based on the results of removing the predator (either naturally not present in some plants, but present in others or experimentally removed) and measuring the effects of this onto a variety of plant features (involving vegetative growth or reproduction). Is this all what we have? Can anecdotal observations only be counted with one hand?
This is not quite "not manipulative", but I think this is what your are asking for. We used a simple assay of gluing Manduca (hornworm) eggs to plants and then quantified their removal as a very reliable proxy of predation pressure. See attached paper.
Thank you for the paper Andre. I like this kind of intensive field-work experimentation...
I found an interesting paper on pure observational data for ambush predation (ant attacking pollinators). [Rodriguez-Girones et al. 2013 Journal of Ecology 101, 1000-1006. -in case the link is not working-]. I believe that observing events like predation, 100% un-manipulated are a jewel, something that triggers some lines of investigation.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2745.12100/abstract;jsessionid=312AD2DFBEEC46BB7F012BB2A2F2E902.f02t04?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false
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