Optimal Foraging: Simulation Studies of Diet Choice in a Stochastic Environment

-Foraging models are a growing pan of the ethnobiological study of huntergatherers . Highly simplified for analytic reasons, the early "classical" versions of these models excluded consideration of several relevant factors. Among them is the possibilit y of maladaptive food shortages due to the effects of stochastic environmental fluctuations on food capture rates . To remedy this deficiency, the present simulation study develops a stochastic, risk-minimizing analog to the widely used but deterministic and ratemaximizing diet choice model. The results indicate that optimal efficiency-maximizing and risk-minimizing choices are quite similar. However, even with the optimal riskminimizing choice, the forager in a stochastic environment will experience large variations in food capture rate from one time interval to the next . This and other studies using and developing foraging theory hold the promise of a micro-ecological theory of huntergatherer economie s, past and present .