Abstract
When a foraging notonecif bug extracts the juices from a prey item, it will, at some point, stop extracting and begin to search for another prey item. Behavioral ecologists have found that predators, like my hypothetical notonectid, will extract a high proportion of the available resources from a given prey, taking a long time to do it, when prey are scarce, but the same predator will extract less and give up more quickly if prey are abundant.
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Stephens, D.W. (1993). Learning and Behavioral Ecology: Incomplete Information and Environmental Predictability. In: Papaj, D.R., Lewis, A.C. (eds) Insect Learning. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2814-2_8
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