Worker honey bees change roles as they age as part of a hormonally regulated process of behavioural development that ends with a specialised foraging phase. The rate of behavioural development is highly plastic and responsive to changes in colony condition such that forager losses, disease or nutritional stresses accelerate behavioural development and cause an early onset of foraging in workers...

Effective foraging is necessary for nearly all animals, but most animals are not born with adult-like foraging performance. Instead, foraging skills are developed during an individual’s lifetime. Life-history theory predicts that adult-level foraging performance should be reached prior to the start of reproduction, but for most species, we know little about age-specific foraging in the wild. He...

Foraging is a key aspect of a species’ ecology and decisions made while foraging affect fitness in many ways. Although much research has focused on snake foraging, only a handful of detailed studies have been conducted on free-ranging individuals, all on Crotalus horridus. We used fixed videography to collect data on free-ranging Northern Pacific Rattlesnake (Crotalus oreganus) behavior to qual...

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...

foraging honeybee nap plasticity shift work sleep Shifts in work schedules test humans ' capacity to be fl exibl e in the timing of both work and sleep. Honeybee. Apis rnellifera. foragers also shift their work schedules. but how flexible they are in the timing of sl eep as they shift the timing of work is unknown. despite the importance of colonY-level plasticity in the face of a changing envi...

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 ...