In vertebrates, the well established increase in plasma corticosterone in response to food shortage is thought to mediate adjustments of foraging behavior and energy allocation to environmental conditions. However, investigating the functional role of corticosterone is often constrained by the difficulty to track time-activity budget of free-ranging animals. To examine how an experimental incre...

Most competition studies between species are conducted from a population-level approach. Few studies have examined inter-specific competition in conjunction with intra-specific competition, with an individual-based approach. To our knowledge, none has been conducted on marine top predators. Sympatric Galapagos fur seals (Arctocephalus galapagoensis) and sea lions (Zalophus wollebaeki) share sim...

Increasing human land use for agriculture and housing leads to the loss of natural habitat and to widespread declines in wild bees. Bee foraging dynamics and fitness depend on the availability of resources in the surrounding landscape, but how precisely landscape related resource differences affect bee foraging patterns remains unclear. To investigate how landscape and its interaction with seas...

Heterogeneity in foraging behaviour can profoundly influence ecological processes shaping populations. To scale-up from individual foraging behaviour to processes occurring at the population scale, one needs to sample foraging behaviour at the individual level, and over large temporal scales or during critical seasons known to influence life-history traits. We developed an innovative technique ...

A fundamental study by Ens et al. (1992, Journal of Animal Ecology, 61, 703) developed the concept of two different nest-territory qualities in Eurasian oystercatchers (Haematopus ostralegus, L.), resulting in different reproductive successes. "Resident" oystercatchers use breeding territories close to the high-tide line and occupy adjacent foraging territories on mudflats. "Leapfrog" oystercat...

The foraging behaviour in web building spiders involves: (1) placing the web in the habitat, (2) constructing the web, (3) attacking prey entangled in the web, and (4) ingesting prey (Leborgne et al., 1991). Foraging theory suggests that organisms should exhibit foraging behaviour that optimizes the relationship between benefits and costs (Schoener, 1971; Pyke et al., 1977). The two major benef...

Urban bird communities have higher densities but lower diversity compared with wildlands. However, recent studies show that residential urban yards with native plantings have higher native bird diversity compared with yards with exotic vegetation. Here we tested whether landscape designs also affect bird foraging behavior. We estimated foraging decisions by measuring the giving-up densities (GU...

Unlike most species, after food deprivation, Siberian hamsters increase foraging and food hoarding, two appetitive ingestive behaviors, but not food intake, a consummatory ingestive behavior. We previously demonstrated (Wood AD, Bartness TJ, Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol 272: R783-R792, 1997) that increases in food hoarding are triggered by directly decreasing body fat levels through p...

11 With technical advances in wildlife telemetry, the study of cryptic predators’ responses to prey 12 distribution has been revolutionised. Considering marine predators, high resolution tagging 13 devices were developed lately to collect long and precise diving datasets. In this study, we 14 investigated, at fine temporal and spatial scales, changes in the horizontal movements and 15 diving pa...

In modelling bumble bee foraging, net rate of energetic intake has been suggested as the appropriate currency. The foraging behaviour of honey bees is better predicted by using efficiency, the ratio of energetic gain to expenditure, as the currency. We re-analyse several studies of bumble bee foraging and show that efficiency is as good a currency as net rate in terms of predicting behaviour. W...