How-To-Do-It Testing Concepts of Animal Foraging Behavior An Experiment Using Seed Trays

Beginning students in ecology are almost universally interested in animal behavior, but few have a comfortable grasp of the evolutionary approach to the study of animal behavior and ecology. Because an evolutionary approach is essential to understanding in most aspects of the discipline (Alcock 1993), I have worked to develop an ecology exercise that exposes students to ‘‘evolutionary thinking.’’ In the exercise I first teach some theoretical concepts in the form of a graphical model, and then allow the students to apply the concepts by developing a field experiment to test predictions of the model. The evolutionary approach to the study of animal behavior views behavior as the product of natural selection, and thus asks what behavioral patterns are expected to evolve in an animal, given a set of basic assumptions about the animal. This approach often makes use of optimality models that formulate mathematical solutions to problems in animal behavior by first establishing a set of basic constraints or assumptions about the animal, and then solving to find the behavior that maximizes a relevant component of the animal’s evolutionary fitness. This approach is very useful in the study of behavior because it allows us to understand why an animal behaves the way it does, not just how it behaves. Thus the evolutionary approach allows the study of animal behavior to be a predictive, rather than descriptive, science.