Abstract
Abstract Do predators take all the individual prey belonging to one species that they encounter, and if not, to what degree are some prey under-represented in the diet and why? These questions are important in every study of the interaction between predators and their food supply. This chapter first analyses the degree to which the selection of prey sizes within one prey species by Oystercatchers can be understood as a passive process in which a randomly searching bird takes all the prey it encounters; this will be referred to as ‘passive size selection’. As we shall see, however, Oystercatchcrs reject certain size classes of prey which they actually encounter, and hence there is also ‘an active size selection’, The rules that Oystercatchers obey when selecting size classes actively, and whether these can be derived from optimal foraging models, are then discussed.
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