ABSTRACT
Finding food is central for individual animal growth and survival, and foraging performance hereby constitutes an important fitness component. This chapter focuses on the behavioural foraging decisions made by pike in different circumstances. It considers pike and the functional response, pike and the predation cycle, pike prey preference, as well as pike specialization and phenotypic plasticity. Pike, or any predators, have to successfully progress through a number of critical steps to acquire food. Pike are gape-size limited predators, and there are hence limits to the maximum prey to pike size ratio allowing prey ingestion. Pike generally swallow prey head first, so if a prey individual has a body depth greater than the gape width of a specific size of pike, the prey enjoys a size refuge from predation. The predation-cycle approach to describe pike foraging behaviour, functional responses and their higher-order consequences is based on an optimality perspective that hitherto in this text does not consider diversity in adaptive traits.
