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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 ...
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.
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.
Flocking is the behavior exhibited when a group of birds, called a flock, are foraging or in flight. Sheep and goats also exhibit flocking behavior. Computer simulations and mathematical models that have been developed to emulate the flocking behaviours of birds can also generally be applied to the "flocking" behaviour of other species.
Lovebirds are well known for mirroring the behaviour of their cage-mates, a form of social facilitation. Social facilitation in animals is when the performance of a behaviour by an animal increases the probability of other animals also engaging in that behaviour or increasing the intensity of the behaviour.
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.