ABSTRACT
The study of foraging behavior raises numerous and interesting questions concerning the relationship between an animal's environment and its learning abilities. In recent years, the study of this relationship has been directly addressed by both learning psychologists and behavioral ecologists; these investigators have emphasized the complex nature of the animal-environment interaction in foraging behavior (see Kamil & Sargent, 1981). Foraging, whether hunting for prey or finding plant food, is a pattern of behaviors that may be conceptualized as involving a series of problems facing the forager: where to look for food, how to identify it, and so on. The solution to each of these problems is a direct function of environmental factors such as the variability of food supply with changing season, the density of food in various areas, and the distribution (clumped, scattered) of those items. Previous research has focused especially on an analysis of a forager's response to discrete changes in the availability of food. For example, certain predators are sensitive to the profitability of a search in specific niches and change their search path or locus of search with fluctuations in prey density (see review by Krebs, 1973).
