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Uncertainty in future climate change challenges water infrastructure development decisions. Flexible infrastructure development, in which infrastructure is proactively designed to be changed in the future, can reduce the risk of overbuilding unnecessary infrastructure while maintaining reliable water supply. Flexible strategies assume that water planners will learn over time, updating future climate projections and using that new information to change plans. Previous work has developed methods to incorporate learning using climate observations into flexible planning but has not quantified the impact of different amounts of learning on the effectiveness of flexible planning. In this work, we develop a framework to assess how differences in the amount of learning about climate uncertainty affect the value of flexible water infrastructure planning. In the first part of our framework, we design climate scenarios with different amounts of learning using an exploratory Bayesian modeling approach. Then, we quantify the impacts of learning on flexibility using simulated costs and infrastructure decisions. We demonstrate this framework on a stylized case study of the Mwache Dam near Mombasa, Kenya. Flexible planning is more effective in avoiding over‐ or underbuilding under high‐learning scenarios, especially in avoiding overbuilding in wet climates. This framework provides insight on the climate conditions and learning scenarios that make flexible infrastructure most valuable. 

In the course of conducting honey bee experiments on the Greek Island of Lesbos we took the opportunity to observe the reactions of ants, Messor oertzeni Forel (Hymenoptera Formicidae Myrmicinae), to a baited ant trap placed in its main foraging path (active ingredient: sodium cacodylate). Each trap had three entrances and we tested five nests. For 14 days we observed the nests and photographs were taken daily to document our observations. Following a baseline condition in which none of the three entrances were open, one entrance was open. Several days later the entrance we opened was turned 90 degrees away from the main foraging trail and a second entrance was opened and placed in the same orientation as the first entrance (i.e., in the main foraging path). Our observations revealed that for four of the five ant colonies, the ants built a barrier around the opened entrance preventing other ants from entering the trap. The materials they used to bar the entrance was composed of twigs, pebbles and soil. We believe that the apparent ability of ants to avoid the effects of an insecticide by baring the entrance to a bait trap is a novel finding and should be replicated under more controlled conditions.