1. Forest fragmentation often results in a matrix of open areas mixed with patches of forest. Both biotic and abiotic factors can affect consumer species' ability to utilize the altered habitat, especially for species that range over large areas searching for prey. 2. Army ants (Formicidae: Ecitoninae) are highly mobile top predators in terrestrial Neotropical ecosystems. Army ant foraging beha...

Traditionally, optimal foraging theory has been applied to situations in which a forager makes decisions about current resource consumption based on tradeoffs in resource attributes (e.g. caloric intake versus handling time). Food storage, which permits animals to manage the availability of food in space and time, adds a complex dimension to foraging decisions, and may influence the predictions...

When foraging, animals can maximize their fitness if they are able to tailor their foraging decisions to current environmental conditions. When making foraging decisions, individuals need to assess the benefits of foraging while accounting for the potential risks of being captured by a predator. However, whether and how different factors interact to shape these decisions is not yet well underst...

This article summarizes 5 years of research on resource choice and foraging strategy among Ache foragers in eastern Paraguay. Successes and failures of simple models from optimal foraging theory (OFT) are discussed and revisions are suggested in order to bring the models in line with empirical evidence from the Ache. The following conclusions emerge: (1) Energetic returns from various alternati...

Foraging and feeding requirements shape ecologic and evolutionary patterns for many predatory organisms. The idea that organisms maximize energy intake during foraging is one of the major assumptions of foraging theories (Schoener 1971; Pyke et al. 1977). From recent studies (for review see Brown & Kotler 2004) it is apparent that foraging decisions are not strictly related to meal size but tha...

Evidence for carcass access times and levels of early hominid mobility is synthesized using studies of carnivore ethology and theories of interspecific competition to arrive at tentative conclusions about the organization of Plio-Pleistocene hominid foraging groups. The model presented suggests that group foraging tactics, in combination with high mobility, are central to successful confrontati...

Animals avoid temperatures that constrain foraging by restricting activity to specific times of the day or year. However, because temperature alters the availability of food resources, it is difficult to separate temperature-dependent effects on foraging and the occupation of temporal niches. By studying two congeneric, sympatric Myrmecia ants we isolated the effect of temperature and investiga...

Trunk trails, used by Pogonomyrmex barbatus and P. rugosus during foraging and homing, have the effect of avoiding aggressive confrontations between neighboring colonies of the same species. They channel the mass of foragers of hostile neighboring nests into diverging directions, before each ant pursues its individual foraging exploration. This channeling subtly partitions the foraging grounds ...

Bacterial Foraging Optimization Technique is used in optimization for grid computing as they get their inspirations from evolutionary idea of natural evolution. It has been broadly accepted as a global optimization algorithm of current interest for distributed optimization and control. This algorithm is inspired by the social foraging behavior of Escherichia coli. Bacterial Foraging Optimizatio...

Caste polyethism has been recorded in some termite species, however the foraging behavior of subterranean termites remains poorly known. Heterotermes tenuis Hagen (Isoptera: Rhinotermitidae) is a subterranean termite that is native to Brazil and is an agricultural and urban pest. The aim of this study was to investigate which caste acts as scouts when searching for food sources and determinate ...