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Foraging Strategies and Their Social Significance

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Social Behavior and Communication

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to discuss foraging behavior from a functional point of view. I will review the attempts to construct general rules about the design of predator behavior based on the theory of natural selection. The general approach in this type of work is to work out in theory how an ideal predator ought to behave and to test these rules against observations or experiments. Since natural selection is an optimizing process, it should be possible to formulate the rules for the decisions of an ideal predator based on the principle of optimization. A completely independent argument for using optimality models is that many aspects of decision making (in both nonbiological and biological contexts) can be understood by assuming that there is a maximizing principle and that the decision maker trades off the benefit of alternative courses of action. One point that follows from this argument is that using optimality theory to study decisions does not necessarily assume in a Panglossian way that animals are perfectly adapted to their environment (Krebs, Houston, and Charnov, 1979). Optimality models form the basis of a considerable body of literature on foraging, and a similar approach has been used in some discussions of group size and territorial defense.

This article was written in December 1976 and was updated in February 1979.

The work was supported by the Science Research Council.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology, Zoology Department, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

    John R. Krebs

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  1. Rockefeller University, New York, New York, USA

    Peter Marler

  2. North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA

    J. G. Vandenbergh

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© 1979 Plenum Press, New York

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Krebs, J.R. (1979). Foraging Strategies and Their Social Significance. In: Marler, P., Vandenbergh, J.G. (eds) Social Behavior and Communication. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9116-0_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9116-0_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4615-9118-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4615-9116-0

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