Abstract
Animals living in complex environments experience differing risks of predation depending upon their location within the landscape. An animal could reduce the risk it experiences by remaining in a refuge site, but it may need to emerge from its refuge and enter more dangerous sites for feeding and other activities. Here, I consider the actions of an animal choosing to travel a short distance between a safe refuge and a dangerous foraging site, such as a bird leaving cover to visit a feeder. Although much work has been conducted examining the choice between a refuge and a foraging site when faced with a trade-off between starvation and predation risk, the work presented here is the first to consider the travel behaviour between these locations. Using state-dependent stochastic dynamic programming, I illustrate that there are several forms of optimal behaviour that can emerge. In some situations, the animal should choose to travel without stopping between sites, but in other cases, it is optimal for the animal to travel hesitantly towards the food, and to stop its travel at a point before it reaches the refuge. I discuss how this hesitant ‘dawdling’ behaviour may be optimal, and suggest further work to test these predictions.
Highlights
The threat of being eaten influences many of the behavioural and life-history decisions made by organisms [1,2]
The policy forms differed in how individuals with intermediate levels of energy reserves should behave, mostly showing a clear energy threshold level at a given location, such that the animal should move homeward if its reserves fall above this threshold, and move to the foraging site if its reserves fall below the threshold
This essentially means that the individual should tend to move towards the foraging site when its energy reserves are suitably low, and towards the refuge once it has replenished its reserves, and so following the policy should keep the individual within the state space in the policies that is close to the switching threshold between behaviours
Summary
The threat of being eaten influences many of the behavioural and life-history decisions made by organisms [1,2]. Animals can adjust the predation risk that they experience by choosing where they move. Seeking and remaining within sheltered locations will reduce exposure to predators [3,4], but animals using these refuges will face a trade-off between being safe and being able to conduct other mutually exclusive behaviours such as foraging or seeking a mate. Because it will need to eat before it starves, an animal will be expected to dynamically switch its behaviour between seeking refuge and foraging [5,6]. An animal will experience differing feeding opportunities and levels of predation risk as it moves through the landscape [7,8,9,10].
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