Social foraging and the associated benefits of group-living in Cliff Swallows decrease over 40 years.

Animals that feed socially can sometimes better locate prey, often by transferring information about food that is patchy, dense, and temporally and spatially unpredictable. Information transfer is a potential benefit of living in breeding colonies where unsuccessful foragers can more readily locate successful ones and thereby improve feeding efficiency. Most studies on social foraging have been short-term, and how long-term environmental change affects both foraging strategies and the associated benefits of coloniality is generally unknown.

No Detectable Insecticide Resistance in Swallow Bugs (Hemiptera: Cimicidae) Following Long-Term Exposure to Naled (Dibrom 8).

The swallow bug, Oeciacus vicarius Horvath, is a hematophagous ectoparasite of the cliff swallow, Petrochelidon pyrrhonota Vieillot, and is closely related to bed bugs (Cimex spp.). Evolution of insecticide resistance has been documented for bed bugs but not studied in Oeciacus.

Fluctuating survival selection explains variation in avian group size.

Most animal groups vary extensively in size. Because individuals in certain sizes of groups often have higher apparent fitness than those in other groups, why wide group size variation persists in most populations remains unexplained. We used a 30-y mark-recapture study of colonially breeding cliff swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) to show that the survival advantages of different colony sizes fluctuated among years.

Predation by ants controls swallow bug (Hemiptera: Cimicidae: Oeciacus vicarius) infestations.

The swallow bug (Oeciacus vicarius) is the only known vector for Buggy Creek virus (BCRV), an alphavirus that circulates in cliff swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) and house sparrows (Passer domesticus) in North America. We discovered ants (Crematogaster lineolata and Formica spp.) preying on swallow bugs at cliff swallow colonies in western Nebraska, U.