Central place foraging and the long-term liability of selecting the ‘wrong’ central place

Shelter provided by a fixed refuge like a burrow or nest has obvious advantages for central place foragers: the energy and time required to construct the refuge is expected to be offset by improvements in survival and reproduction. This assumes the refuge is positioned appropriately in the environment to access food and other resources, and that the environment itself remains stable over time. We investigated the long-term liability of refuge placement and adverse environmental change on an iconic central place forager, the Australian meat ant (Iridomyrmex purpureus). We measured the consequences of nest location on the thermal conditions experienced at the nest and how those conditions influenced the opportunity to forage and defend the nest from predation. These data were combined with direct field observations of foraging effort and changes in nest size obtained from over a decade of study. Getting the location of a nest wrong had a lasting impact on the growth of a nest and colonies..., , # Data from: Central place foraging and the long-term liability of selecting the ‘wrong’ central place

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.2rbnzs81s](10.5061/dryad.2rbnzs81s)

## Description of the data and file structure

Data files are .csv and can be opened using any text, spreadsheet or statistical program.

Missing values are indicated by NA.

### Files and variables

##### **File: OrdBlazek\_foraging\_performance.csv**

**Description:** 

This file contains the data used to compute temperature-dependent performance curves of meat ant foraging behaviour

The file has the following columns:

nest_size_number_of_entrance_holes

\- An estimate of nest size based on the number of visible entrance holes on the surface of the nest

ant_nestID

\- The unique ID number of a given nest

time_of_day_24hr

\- The time of day in 24 hour-time when the data was collected

surface_tempC_gun

\- Trail surface temperature in degrees C as measured by the thermometer gun

surface_tempC_converted

\- Trail s...,