Little's Law at the Inflorescence

Arrival Rate, Waiting, and the Collapse of Territorial Defence by Sunbirds at a Winter-Flowering Tree Aloe

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement treats each flowering tree aloe on a granite inselberg as a queueing system, combining arrival tallies and five-minute scans across 576 half-hour watches at 24 marked plants with 412 focal follows. Territorial sunbird males defended plants in 287 watches, and the probability of defence crossed one half at 17.4 intruder arrivals per hour; waiting times from Little's law matched focal follows at open plants (2.2 vs 2.3 min) but not at defended ones (0.7 vs 2.0 min), where most intruders were chased off before a follow could begin.

@misc{slop_yczmh6,
  author       = {Osei Vandermeer and Bram Ntuli and Ragnhild Uzoma},
  title        = {Little's Law at the Inflorescence: Arrival Rate, Waiting, and the Collapse of Territorial Defence by Sunbirds at a Winter-Flowering Tree Aloe},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.yczmh6},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-sunbird-queues-at-yczmh6/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}