Defining The MVT
All animals must forage for food in order to meet their energetic needs, but doing so is energetically costly. It is assumed that evolution by natural selection results in animals utilizing the most economic and efficient strategy to balance energy gain and consumption. Optimal foraging theories help us understand these strategies. The Marginal Value Theorem is an optimization model that describes the strategy that maximizes gain per unit time in systems where resources, and thus rate of returns, decrease with time. The model weighs benefits and costs and is used to predict giving up time and giving up density. Giving up time (GUT) is the interval of time between when the animal last feeds and when it leaves the patch. Giving up density (GUD) is the food density within a patch when the animal will chose to move on to other food patches.
When an animal is foraging in a system where food sources are patchily distributed, the MVT can be used to predict how much time an individual will spend searching for a particular patch before moving on to a new one. In general, individuals will stay longer if (1) patches are farther apart and thus there is a higher cost of travel or (2) current patches are rich in resources.
Read more about this topic: Marginal Value Theorem
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“Art, if one employs this term in the broad sense that includes poetry within its realm, is an art of creation laden with ideals, located at the very core of the life of a people, defining the spiritual and moral shape of that life.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)