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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 July 2009
We present an individual-based model of an animal that forages in a spatially explicit environment for food which it uses to maintain itself. The model subsumes optimal foraging theory as a special case of a general dynamical theory of foraging, capable of predicting both the transient behaviour and the steady-state behaviour of the forager in heterogeneous environments that vary with time. It also predicts aspects of the social structuring of populations of competing foragers, and can do so in environments containing food that is ingested continuously or as individual particles. The model has been elaborated to represent the collection of food by diving seabirds, treating the collection of oxygen between dives as the collection of a second nutrient from a continuous patch. The models provide the basic building blocks of individual-based models of populations of animals which can predict the spatial disposition of populations of animals in environments in which the resources necessary for life are not uniformly distributed.
In order to understand the relationship between the spatial distribution of animals and the spatial distribution of their food supply, it is insufficient simply to assume that there will be a correlation between the standing crop of prey and the standing crop of the predators that feed on it. What matters to the individual animal is availability of food, and that will be determined by its own biological properties and the biological properties of its prey.
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