Foraging: Behavior and Ecology. David W. Stephens, Joel S. Brown, and Ronald C. Ydenberg, editors.

Abstract

Naturalists and scientists have for centuries observed and recorded many details of what, when, and where species eat, but the first conceptual framework for a theory of foraging by wild animals did not begin to emerge until the late 1960s with the seminal paper of MacArthur and Pianka (1966). These authors suggested that foraging behavior evolved to maximize individual fitness subject to constraints and, in this sense, animals may forage optimally. Interest in foraging theory exploded in the 1970s as experimental studies of foraging supported many of the predictions of the early models. A number of reviews and books (e.g. Pyke et al. 1977; Stephens and Krebs 1986) in the late 1970s and 1980s summarized the first two decades of foraging studies and gave generally upbeat assessments of the state of the growing theoretical and empirical foraging enterprise.