Year: 2005
Type: article
Abstract: Food in a natural environment is often distributed in patches, spots of higher resource abundance than in the surrounding area. For an animal or human searching on the sea shore, each patch might be a rock pool. Models of animal foraging have considered the situation where such patches vary in their initial quality (return rates), where this may be hard to judge because food items are hidden, and where foraging progressively depletes the resource. As animals learn about and simultaneously deplete a patch they should eventually decide to move because greater success is expected elsewhere. The optimal strategy in such a situation is given by the Marginal Value Theorem (MVT): leave a patch when the instantaneous rate of return falls below the long-term return rate in the whole environment when following the
Authors: Andreas Wilke, J. Hutchinson, Peter M. Todd
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W796071850