Implications of Foraging Behavior

Abstract

The scientific study of ecology began in the 20th century with ideas about population dynamics and trophic interactions in food webs. The study of animal behavior developed around mid-century. Borrowing ideas from the rapidly expanding field of economics, the notion that one could think of foragers as clever strategists with flexible behavior came along in the 1960s. In subsequent decades “optimal foraging” grew rapidly. Analogous lines of thinking for other behaviors such as mate selection, parental care, life histories, and social interactions merged to form behavioral ecology in the 1970s and 1980s. Foraging theorists originally aimed to apply their thinking to population and community ecology. Facing criticism from ecologists, many instead developed strong links with ethology, experimental psychology, and neurobiology. But in the last two decades a series of discoveries have helped move the study of foraging toward fulfilling its ambitions of explaining “higher order” ecological phenomena such as predator-prey relationships and community structure. These discoveries are the subject of this bibliography. The most basic insight came from another notion borrowed from economics: that of a trade-off. Given a trade-off, a behavior can do one of two things well, or both moderately well, but cannot maximize both things at once. For example, an animal can forage quickly, but it cannot watch for predators, mates, or competitors at the same time. The trade-off between foraging and predation risk became fundamental. As the 21st century arrived, ecologists began to realize that anti-predator behavior has effects on populations and communities at least as big and as important as those attributable to the prey killed by predators. These discoveries are currently spurring ecologists to develop new theoretical and empirical techniques to investigate the role of foraging behavior in population ecology and community structure.