Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Foraging theory is a branch of behavioral ecology that studies the foraging behavior of animals in response to the environment where the animal lives. Behavioral ecologists use economic models and categories to understand foraging; many of these models are a type of optimal model.
Optimal foraging theory is widely applicable to feeding systems throughout the animal kingdom. Under the OFT, any organism of interest can be viewed as a predator that forages prey.
Risk sensitive foraging is based on experimental evidence that the net energy budget level of an animal is predictive of type of foraging activity an animal will employ. [1] Experimental evidence has indicated that individuals will change the type of foraging strategy that they use depending on environmental conditions and ability to meet net ...
The marginal value theorem (MVT) is an optimality model that usually describes the behavior of an optimally foraging individual in a system where resources (often food) are located in discrete patches separated by areas with no resources. Due to the resource-free space, animals must spend time traveling between patches.
Circular dendrogram of feeding behaviours A mosquito drinking blood (hematophagy) from a human (note the droplet of plasma being expelled as a waste) A rosy boa eating a mouse whole A red kangaroo eating grass The robberfly is an insectivore, shown here having grabbed a leaf beetle An American robin eating a worm Hummingbirds primarily drink nectar A krill filter feeding A Myrmicaria brunnea ...
Vigilance is an important behaviour during foraging as animals must often venture away from the safety of shelter to find food. However, being vigilant comes at the expense of time spent feeding, so there is a trade-off between the two. The length of time animals devote to vigilance is dependent on many factors including predation risk and hunger.
As an optimal foraging model, the Ideal Free Distribution predicts that the ratio of individuals between two foraging sites will match the ratio of resources in those two sites. This prediction is similar to the Matching Law of individual choice, which states that an individual's rate of response will be proportional to the positive ...
Central place foraging (CPF) theory is an evolutionary ecology model for analyzing how an organism can maximize foraging rates while traveling through a patch (a discrete resource concentration), but maintains the key distinction of a forager traveling from a home base to a distant foraging location rather than simply passing through an area or travelling at random.