Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
Bull Math Biol. 2010 May;72(4):896-913. doi: 10.1007/s11538-009-9473-z. Epub 2009 Nov 14.
A large number of observational and theoretical studies have investigated animal movement strategies for finding randomly located food items. Many of these studies have claimed that a particular strategy is advantageous over other strategies or that the spatial distribution of the food items affects the search efficiency. Here, we study a deliberately idealised problem, in which a blind forager searches for re-visitable food items. We show analytically that the forager's efficiency is completely independent of both its movement strategy and the spatial pattern of the food items and depends only on the density of food in the environment. However, in some cases, apparent optima in search strategies can arise as artefacts of inappropriate and inaccurate numerical simulations. We discuss modifications to the idealised foraging problem that can confer an advantage on certain strategies, including when the forager has some memory or knowledge of the environment; when the food items are non-revisitable; and when the problem is viewed in an evolutionary context.
大量的观察和理论研究已经调查了动物的运动策略，以寻找随机分布的食物。这些研究中的许多声称，一种特定的策略比其他策略更有利，或者食物的空间分布会影响搜索效率。在这里，我们研究了一个故意理想化的问题，即一个盲目觅食者寻找可重新访问的食物。我们从理论上证明，觅食者的效率完全独立于其运动策略和食物的空间模式，而只取决于环境中食物的密度。然而，在某些情况下，搜索策略中的明显最优解可能是由于不适当和不准确的数值模拟的人为产物。我们讨论了对理想化觅食问题的修改，这些修改可以为某些策略带来优势，包括当觅食者对环境有一些记忆或了解时；当食物不可访问时；以及在进化背景下看待这个问题时。
