News tagged with foraging
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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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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Gene Tells Soldier Ants to Beat Swords into Ploughshares
(PhysOrg.com) -- While science has yet to discover what makes that little ol' ant think he'll move that rubber tree plant, researchers at the University of Toronto Mississauga have identified an enzyme in ...
Mar 30, 2009 |
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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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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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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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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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Genes help worms decide where to dine
In the famous song by The Clash, "Should I Stay or Should I Go," the lyrics wrestle with one of the more complicated decisions people make -- whether to end a difficult love affair or try to make it work. We aren’t likely ...
May 19, 2011 |
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Birds must choose between mating, migrating, study finds
Sex or nice weather. That's the agonizing choice some birds face, according to a new University of Guelph study.
Apr 06, 2011 |
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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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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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Gangster birds running protection racket give insight into coevolution
Like gangsters running a protection racket, drongos in the Kalahari Desert act as lookouts for other birds in order to steal a cut of their food catch. The behaviour, revealed in research funded by the Biotechnology ...
Nov 18, 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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Movement patterns of endangered turtle vary from Pacific to Atlantic
The movement patterns of critically endangered leatherback turtles vary greatly depending on whether the animals live in the North Atlantic or the Eastern Pacific, with implications for feeding behavior and ...
May 16, 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.
