The majority of American Oystercatchers (Haematopus palliatus) in South Carolina make their nests on narrow, elevated mounds of oyster shells deposited naturally along the edges of bays by storms or formed artificially by boat wakes along the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (AICW). I compared reproductive success of American Oystercatchers nesting along the AICW with those nesting on naturally f...

Resource partitioning is an important process driving habitat use and foraging strategies in sympatric species that potentially compete. Differences in foraging behavior are hypothesized to contribute to species coexistence by facilitating resource partitioning, but little is known on the multiple mechanisms for partitioning that may occur simultaneously. Studies are further limited in the mari...

A widespread feeding association among reef fishes involves nuclear and attendant species. The former causes a bottom disturbance attracting several species known as followers, which feed on items exposed by this activity. Herein we propose a novel classification for foraging associations namely “ephemeral foraging association” formerly grouped together as nuclear-follower behavior. For this cl...

The relationships between foraging tenure and specialization on materials, and foraging tenure and foraging activity were measured for marked, known-age workers ofthe social wasp Polybia occidentalis. The purpose ofthe study was to assess differences in cost to foragers, in terms ofrisk ofmortality, associated with material specializations and activity level, and determine whether ontogenetic c...

The interactive effects of predator density and prey distribution on the foraging behavior of an important estuarine predator were studied, at a fine temporal scale, using ultrasonic telemetry. The movement and agonistic activity of individual blue crabs Callinectes sapidus were monitored in large field enclosures, in which the density of crabs and the distribution of patches of bivalve prey Ma...

We explore the complex dynamical behavior of two simple predator-prey models of biological coevolution that on the ecological level account for interspecific and intraspecific competition, as well as adaptive foraging behavior. The underlying individual-based population dynamics are based on a ratio-dependent functional response [W.M. Getz, J. theor. Biol. 108, 623 (1984)]. Analytical results f...

Asset allocation is critical for the portfolio management process. In this paper, we solve a dynamic asset allocation problem through a multiperiod stochastic programming model. The objective is to maximise the expected utility of wealth at the end of the planning periods. To improve the optimisation result of the model, we employ swarm intelligent optimisers, the Bacterial Foraging Optimisatio...

BACKGROUND To meet the minimum energetic requirements needed to support parents and their provisioned offspring, the timing of breeding in birds typically coincides with periods of high food abundance. Seasonality and synchrony of the reproductive cycle is especially important for marine species that breed in high latitudes with seasonal booms in ocean productivity. Laysan and black-footed alba...

The Northern Ache comprise a small continuously interacting population with a shared community history. Full-time hunter-gatherers until recently, they now divide their time between mobile foraging and settledfarming. Here we describe adult time allocation at the settlement and contrast it with our previous descriptions of time allocation during foraging periods. We report that at the settlemen...

Mobile devices have become for many the preferred way of interacting with the Internet, social media and the enterprise. However, mobile devices still do not have the computing power and battery life that will allow them to perform effectively over long periods of time or for executing applications that require extensive communication or computation, or low latency. Cyber-foraging is a techniqu...