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Learning and Behavioral Ecology: Incomplete Information and Environmental Predictability

  • Chapter
Insect Learning

Abstract

When a foraging notonecif bug extracts the juices from a prey item, it will, at some point, stop extracting and begin to search for another prey item. Behavioral ecologists have found that predators, like my hypothetical notonectid, will extract a high proportion of the available resources from a given prey, taking a long time to do it, when prey are scarce, but the same predator will extract less and give up more quickly if prey are abundant.

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Authors
  1. David W. Stephens
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Insect Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA

    Daniel R. Papaj

  2. Department of Environmental, Population and Organismic Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA

    Alcinda C. Lewis

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© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Stephens, D.W. (1993). Learning and Behavioral Ecology: Incomplete Information and Environmental Predictability. In: Papaj, D.R., Lewis, A.C. (eds) Insect Learning. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2814-2_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2814-2_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-6216-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4615-2814-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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