Diet Selection

Abstract

Animals are faced with an astonishingly wide variety of things to eat, and each of these foods has an equally wide variety of nutritional constituents. One might suppose accordingly that natural selection would favor wise patterns of diet selection and that the principles guiding diet selection would be relatively straightforward. Several generations of biologists have addressed this very issue, most recently and successfully by borrowing from economics the concepts and procedures of optimality theory (Belovsky 1986; Schoener 1986; Stephens and Krebs 1986). Although it would be naive to claim a consensus has emerged (Pierce and Ollason 1987; Stearns and Schmid-Hempel 1987; Ward 1992, 1993; Nonacs 1993), optimality models of diet selection have received wide acceptance.