Threespine stickleback were used to examine phenotypic plasticity of telencephala in relation to inferred ecology. Fish from derived, allopatric, freshwater populations were sampled from three shallow, structurally complex lakes with benthic-foraging stickleback (benthics) and from three deep, structurally simple lakes with planktivores (limnetics). The telencephalon of specimens preserved imme...

We present a simple model to study Lévy-flight foraging with a power-law step-size distribution [P(l) ∞ l-μ] in a finite landscape with countable targets. We find that different optimal foraging strategies characterized by a wide range of power-law exponent μopt, from ballistic motion (μopt → 1) to Lévy flight (1 < μopt < 3) to Brownian motion (μopt ≥ 3), may arise in adaptation to the interpla...

Question: How are competing foragers expected to distribute their lifetime foraging effort on a gradient of resource types that differ in abundance, quality, foraging costs, and associated mortality risks? Mathematical method: Population dynamics of foragers and resources coupled with adaptive dynamics of foraging strategies based on continuous, function-valued traits. Key assumptions: We start...

1. Identification of foraging behaviour and the ability to assess foraging success is critical to understanding individual and between-species variation in habitat use and foraging ecology. For pelagic predators, behaviour-dependent foraging metrics are commonly used to identify important foraging areas, yet few of these metrics have been validated. 2. Using the northern elephant seal as a mode...

This paper proposes a novel method to improve the efficiency of a swarm of robots searching in an unknown environment. The approach focuses on the process of feeding and individual coordination characteristics inspired by the foraging behavior in nature. A predatory strategy was used for searching; hence, this hybrid approach integrated a random search technique with a dynamic particle swarm op...

Predictions about information search behavior have been informed by extensive research in food foraging behavior. However, information foraging environments may differ in key ways from food foraging environments, and these differences may impact search behavior. We investigated the effect of patch distribution (depleting or non-depleting) and ability to return to previously searched patches on ...

In this paper, we explain the social foraging behavior of E. coli and M. xanthus bacteria and develop simulation models based on the principles of foraging theory that view foraging as optimization. This provides us with novel models of their foraging behavior and with new methods for distributed nongradient optimization. Moreover, we show that the models of both species of bacteria exhibit the...

We present an agent-based foraging model, EPICURE, which captures the results from recent human group foraging experiments (Goldstone and Ashpole, 2004; Goldstone et al., 2005), provides a novel explanation for those results and previous animal foraging results, and makes predictions for future foraging experiments. We describe a series of simulations that test the sources of resource undermatc...

The foraging behavior of Eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) on the University of Maryland campus was compared to the Tivoli neighborhood in the Wheaton-Glendale area of Maryland. Three different sizes of banana slices were presented to squirrels to determine if individuals exhibited a selection preference. Results were compared to the optimal foraging model. The peak activity time of...

Just because the rules surrounding microblogging services are simple does not mean that tools support for them should be simple too. Microblogging generates volumes of interesting social content, but there is a lack of frameworks and tools that allow us to exploit such information and enhance knowledge workers’ sensemaking. Beyond adoption, we believe that new promising research directions on m...