Foraging

Introduction
• Foraging has been looked at from a
functional angle for a long time
• Optimality models etc
• Then you have to look at what
mechanisms might make such
behaviour possible
 How do optimality models
work?
• A Decision is Identified
– Where should an animal feed
– How long should it stay
– What food should it eat?
– Could be a ‘choice’ or it could be an evolutionary
decision
• Decide to leave an area
• ‘Decide’ to evolve the means to de-toxify a plant
• ‘Decide’ how long chewing teeth should be
 Optimality Models – The Saga
Continues
• Assumptions are made about the currency
– What fitness correlated variable is important?
• Maximize energy gain?
• Minimize travel time?
• P(Survival until nightfall)
• Calories/hour
 And finally……
• Assumptions are made about the constraints
– What fixed properties of the animal or the
environment affect the decision
• How much energy can you get out of a food item
• What is the encounter rate?
• How quickly do nectar sources renew themselves?
• How often will I encounter a giant man eating shark?
 The Goal….
• Determine what decision, given the
constraints, maximizes the Currency
• Note that the model will be quantitative
• The model will make precise, testable
predictions
– Who says evolutionary theory does not
lead to testable hypotheses?
Belovsky and the Moose
• Belovsky has done a
bunch of work on many
different species
• Question, how much
aquatic vegetation
should a moose eat?
• Constraints include
sodium and rumen size
 Marginal Value Theorem
• Charnov (1976)
• If P = e / h
– Where P is Profitability, e is energy and h
is handling time
• An animal should leave a food patch
when P(current patch) = (P(all patches))
/ number of patches
 For the mathematically
inclined

• You can see that calculus would play a big

role here
• It is about slopes of curves at given points
 Assumptions
• Animal should ‘know’ P for every patch
in the environment
• Animal must ‘know’ P, e and h for each
patch!
• How do they do this?
– Rules of thumb
• Giving up time
• ROBL
 What’s a psychologist to do?
• The foraging models lead to precise
predictions about results
• They can give clues about what an
animal ‘should’ do
• The Psychologist’s task is to look at the
mechanisms (we have the training)
• Cognitive and behavioural ways that
help an animal reach optimality
 Don’t Get Confused!
• OFT is about function
• Cognitive mechanisms are about cause
• You can look at times when OFT makes
one sort of prediction and animal
cognition make different predictions
(Shettleworth, 1989, 1993)
• REMEMBER THAT THESE ARE NOT
COMPETING EXPLANATIONS
 One mechanism may be…
• The matching law
• Basically the animal matches response
rates to reinforcement rates
• They probably do this by encoding the
time between reinforcers
• This leads in fact to roughly optimal
foraging.
 Conclusion
• This is probably the first place the
psychologists and the biologists came
together.
• Each must recognize the that other’s
explanation is just fine
• Lots of awesome research here