Latest Foraging Stories

Bioluminescence may play a key role in successful foraging for southern elephant seals, a deep-sea predator, according to research published Aug. 29 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The authors of the study, led by Jade Vacquié-Garcia, monitored the diving behaviour of four female southern elephant seals in the southern Indian Ocean that were also equipped with light detectors. The researchers found that increased bioluminescence was correlated with higher foraging intensity,...

A recent study of residential landscape types and native bird communities in Phoenix, Ariz., suggests that yards mimicking native vegetation and wildlands offer birds 'mini refuges,' helping to offset the loss of biodiversity in cities A recent study of residential landscape types and native bird communities in Phoenix, Ariz., led by a University of Massachusetts Amherst urban ecologist suggests that yards mimicking native vegetation and wildlands offer birds "mini refuges," helping to...

A novel methodology shows that Wild meerkats engage in nine separate learning processes during foraging, and this method may provide general insight into learning mechanisms for groups of animals and culture development. The full report is published Aug. 8 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The researchers, led by William Hoppitt of the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom, presented wild meerkats with a novel foraging TASK to investigate the animals' learning mechanisms. They...

Humans move between ‘patches’ in their memory using the same strategy as bees flitting between flowers for pollen or birds searching among bushes for berries. Researchers at the University of Warwick and Indiana University have identified parallels between animals looking for food in the wild and humans searching for items within their memory – suggesting that people with the best ‘memory foraging’ strategies are better at recalling items. Scientists asked people to name as...

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even little kids picking strawberries do it.Every creature that forages for food decides at some point that the food source they're working on is no richer than the rest of the patch and that it's time to move on and find something better.This kind of foraging decision is a fundamental problem that goes far back in evolutionary history and is dealt with by creatures that don't even have proper brains, said Michael Platt, a professor of neurobiology and director of the...

One of the most complex human mysteries involves how and why we became an outlier species in terms of biological success.Research findings published in the March 11 edition of the journal Science by an international team of noted anthropologists, including several from Arizona State University, who study hunter-gatherer societies, are informing the issue by suggesting that human ancestral social structure may be the root of cumulative culture and cooperation and, ultimately, human...

Whether a fish likes to hunt down its food or wait for dinner to arrive is linked to the composition of its brain, a University of Guelph researcher has revealed.Prof. Rob McLaughlin has discovered that foraging behaviour of brook trout is related to the size of a particular region in the fish's brain."We found that the fish that swim around in the open in search of food have larger telencephalons than the fish that sit along the shoreline and wait for food to swim by in the water...

Ever wondered how cockroaches seem to know the best place to grab a meal? New research at Queen Mary, University of London suggests that, just like humans, they share their local knowledge of the best food sources and follow 'recommendations' from others. It is often striking how little we know about our closest neighbor. Until now, it was assumed that cockroaches forage on their own to find food and water. However, this work shows how groups of the insects seem to make a collective choice...

Male and female shopping styles are in our genes"”and we can look to evolution for the reason.Daniel Kruger, research faculty at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, says it's perfectly natural that men often can't distinguish a sage sock from a beige sock or that sometimes women can't tell if the shoe department is due north or west from the escalator.From an evolutionary perspective, it all harkens back to the skills that women used for gathering plant foods and the skills...

If you're looking for reliable information, then you won't necessarily find it in the newspaper. According to Dr. Susan Glover from the University of California in the US, public information from both informal and written sources, like newspapers, leads entrepreneurs astray. In a study¹ just published online in Springer's journal Human Ecology, Dr. Glover took as an example how newspaper propaganda shaped the ore foraging strategies of the late nineteenth century Colorado silver...