Hunting for edible plants with London's urban foragers
Kenneth Greenway is inundated with requests for the foraging courses that he runs at the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in east London.
Kenneth Greenway is inundated with requests for the foraging courses that he runs at the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in east London.
Ecology
Jun 3, 2024
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Researchers have conducted one of the first quantitative studies of social structure and social foraging in Antarctic minke whales, using pioneering animal-borne camera tags.
Plants & Animals
May 27, 2024
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While foraging, animals including humans and monkeys are continuously making decisions about where to search for food and when to move among possible sources of sustenance.
Plants & Animals
Apr 20, 2024
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228
Leaf aging is a complex biological phenomenon influenced by growth stages, plant hormones, and various environmental conditions. In the context of forage and turf grasses, managing leaf aging can significantly enhance the ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 3, 2024
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Killer whales foraging in deep submarine canyons off the coast of California represent a distinct subpopulation that uses specialized hunting techniques to catch marine mammals, Josh McInnes at the University of British Columbia ...
Ecology
Mar 20, 2024
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Fish are changing how they search for and consume prey in warmer waters, with models suggesting that extinctions will become more likely due to this behavior change, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change.
Plants & Animals
Feb 27, 2024
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51
Leatherback sea turtles, the largest of all living turtles, undertake extensive migrations that can span multiple years. They travel from subtropical and tropical nesting locations to temperate foraging areas. Despite decade-long ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 21, 2024
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75
A new study of a migratory songbird shows that individuals with average-sized white tail spots—a trait that is critical to successful foraging—live longer than individuals with more extreme amounts of white in the tail.
Plants & Animals
Nov 30, 2023
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69
Light pollution, or artificial light at night (ALAN), is a rapidly growing threat to nocturnal wildlife around the world, particularly for bats. However, little is known about the distances up to which lights can displace ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 15, 2023
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8
Women during tuber finding events were more likely to sing in large groups of strangers and less likely to sing in large groups of individuals they were close with. This the finding made by a group of international and interdisciplinary ...
Social Sciences
Nov 8, 2023
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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.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA