ABSTRACT
Foraging has been one of the key research areas to dene the development of behavioral ecology as a discipline (Krebs and Davies 1993; Owens 2006). However, despite the considerable research effort devoted to studying foraging behavior, a number of fundamental questions with respect to the adaptiveness of foraging strategies remain relatively unexplored. Generally, we still understand very little about how foraging strategies contribute to the tness of animals in the wild. How well does a given foraging strategy perform relative to strategies used by other individuals, colonies, or species? Does variation in foraging-related traits actually translate into real differences in tness?
