Optimal Foraging and Limitations of Digestive Rate
The Digestive rate model (DRM) of optimal foraging makes the same basic assumption as do other models, i.e. animals select food in order to maximize their rate of energy intake. Therefore, it belongs to Optimal foraging theory. However, it makes the point that some animals should select food on the basis of its 'digestive quality' (net energy content/digestive turnover time) rather than its 'profitability' (net energy content/handling time). Food or prey can come at the expense of indigestible bulk that takes up capacity in the digestive tract. The DRM states that animals under some circumstances will maximize their digestive rate instead of their food ingestion rate or foraging behaviour as predicted by the Contingency Model, the basic and most commonly used model of OFT. The DRM is a useful alternative to the foraging models that maximize ingestion rate only, as it explains some behaviour currently looked on as deviation from OFT.
Read more about this topic: Optimal Foraging Theory
Famous quotes containing the words optimal, foraging, limitations and/or rate:
“In the most desirable conditions, the child learns to manage anxiety by being exposed to just the right amounts of it, not much more and not much less. This optimal amount of anxiety varies with the child’s age and temperament. It may also vary with cultural values.... There is no mathematical formula for calculating exact amounts of optimal anxiety. This is why child rearing is an art and not a science.”
—Alicia F. Lieberman (20th century)
“Soft are the hands of Love,
but what soft hands
clutched at the thorny ground,
scratched like a small white ferret
or foraging whippet or hound.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“Much of what contrives to create critical moments in parenting stems from a fundamental misunderstanding as to what the child is capable of at any given age. If a parent misjudges a child’s limitations as well as his own abilities, the potential exists for unreasonable expectations, frustration, disappointment and an unrealistic belief that what the child really needs is to be punished.”
—Lawrence Balter (20th century)
“Unless a group of workers know their work is under surveillance, that they are being rated as fairly as human beings, with the fallibility that goes with human judgment, can rate them, and that at least an attempt is made to measure their worth to an organization in relative terms, they are likely to sink back on length of service as the sole reason for retention and promotion.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)