News tagged with foraging
Behavior breakthrough: Like animals, plants demonstrate complex ability to integrate information
A University of Alberta research team has discovered that a plant's strategy to capture nutrients in the soil is the result of integration of different types of information.
Jun 24, 2010 |
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Neuroscience of instinct: How animals overcome fear to obtain food (w/ Video)
(PhysOrg.com) -- When crossing a street, we look to the left and right for cars and stay put on the sidewalk if we see a car close enough and traveling fast enough to hit us before we're able to reach the ...
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Nov 29, 2010 |
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Pheromone increases foraging honey bees, leads to healthier hives
The application of a naturally occurring pheromone to honey bee test colonies increases colony growth resulting in stronger hives overall, according to a new study conducted by scientists at Oregon State University ...
Feb 12, 2011 |
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When their tools get dull, leaf-cutters switch jobs (w/ Video)
When their razor-sharp mandibles wear out, leaf-cutter ants change jobs, remaining productive while letting their more efficient sisters take over cutting, say researchers from two Oregon universities.
Dec 09, 2010 |
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Why the switch from foraging to farming?
Thousands of years ago, our ancestors gave up foraging for food and took up farming, one of the most important and debated decisions in history.
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
Mar 07, 2011 |
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Spanish farmers struggle with lack of rain
When Manuel Montesa takes sheep out to forage in mountains in northern Spain, he must bring water for them because streams near his town have run dry.
Mar 11, 2012 |
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Flight of the bumblebee decoded by mathematicians
(PhysOrg.com) -- Bumblebees use complex flying patterns to avoid predators according to new research from Queen Mary, University of London.
Mar 02, 2012 |
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Testosterone low, but responsive to competition, in Amazonian tribe
(PhysOrg.com) -- It's a rough life for the Tsimane, an isolated indigenous group in Bolivia. They make a living by hunting and foraging in forests, fishing in streams and clearing land by hand to grow crops. ...
Mar 28, 2012 |
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Task force recommends reducing global harvest of 'forage fish'
A task force that conducted one of the most comprehensive analyses of global "forage fish" populations issued its report this week, which strongly recommends implementing more conservative catch limits for these crucial prey ...
Apr 03, 2012 |
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Forage sorghum shows promise as energy crop
(PhysOrg.com) -- In their continuing effort to evaluate crops that can serve as biofuel feedstocks as well as cover crops (and that can fit into crop rotations in Pennsylvania and the Northeast) researchers ...
Mar 30, 2010 |
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Eliminating weeds could put more cows on the pasture
A weed calculator developed by an Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientist tells ranchers the number of additional cows they could raise if they eliminated one or two widespread exotic invasive weeds.
Apr 28, 2010 |
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Insulin signaling key to caste development in bees
What makes a bee grow up to be a queen? Scientists have long pondered this mystery. Now, researchers in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University have fit a new piece into the puzzle of bee development. ...
Jul 14, 2010 |
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Cod resurgence in Canadian waters
Cod and other groundfish populations off the east coast of Canada are showing signs of recovery more than 20 years after the fisheries collapsed in the early 1990s, according to research published today in ...
Jul 27, 2011 |
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Early growth trajectories have long-term effects on fitness, study finds
(PhysOrg.com) -- Food supply and environmental conditions affect the growth rates of organisms, which in turn influence future survival and reproduction. A new study by researchers at the University of California, ...
Oct 28, 2011 |
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Impaired recovery of Atlantic cod -- forage fish or other factors?
In a rapid communication just published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, biologist Douglas Swain of the Gulf Fisheries Centre and Robert Mohn, emeritus scientist, at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography ...
Apr 30, 2012 |
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Foraging
Foraging is the act of searching for food. As a field of study, foraging theory is a branch of behavioral ecology that studies the foraging behavior of animals in response to the environment in which the animal lives. Foraging theory considers the foraging behavior of animals in reference to the payoff that an animal obtains from different foraging options. Foraging theory predicts that the foraging options that deliver the highest payoff should be favored by foraging animals because it will have the highest fitness payoff. More specifically, the highest ratio of energetic gain to cost while foraging. Human societies that subsist mainly by foraging wild plants and animals are known as hunter-gatherers.
Optimal foraging theory was first proposed in 1966, in two papers published independently, by Robert MacArthur and Eric Pianka, and by J. Merritt Emlen. This theory argued that because of the key importance of successful foraging to an individual's survival, it should be possible to predict foraging behavior by using decision theory to determine the behavior that would be shown by an "optimal forager" - one with perfect knowledge of what to do to maximize usable food intake. While the behavior of real animals inevitably departs from that of the optimal forager, optimal foraging theory has proved very useful in developing hypotheses for describing real foraging behavior. Departures from optimality often help to identify constraints either in the animal's behavioral or cognitive repertoire, or in the environment, that had not previously been suspected. With those constraints identified, foraging behavior often does approach the optimal pattern even if it is not identical to it.
There are many versions of optimal foraging theory that are relevant to different foraging situation. These include:
In recent decades, optimal foraging theory has often been applied to the foraging behaviour of human hunter-gatherers. Although this is controversial, coming under some of the same kinds of attack as the application of socio biological theory to human behaviour, it does represent a convergence of ideas from human ecology and economic anthropology that has proved fruitful and interesting.
Important contributions to foraging theory have been made by:
It has been demostrated on Elysia clarki for the first time in animals in 2011, that photosynthetic capability affects foraging behavior under starvation.
For more information about Foraging, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
