Diet Selection and Functional Response

The last three chapters discussed how regulatory and economic principles apply to experiments on feeding, the allocation of time among various activities, and choice between different ways of getting food. But a critical test of any approach is how well it can deal with the way animals behave in nature. It is hard to devise a fair test, of course, because in nature nothing is controlled, and observations will nearly always be incomplete. Nevertheless, applications of these principles to problems of diet selection and foraging in natural or close-to-natural conditions have been increasingly successful. This chapter deals with the application of optimality arguments to problems posed by natural foraging behavior.