Basic Variables of OFT
The OFT attempts to explain predator behavior since no predator eats everything available. This is typically due to habitat and size constraints, but even within habitats, predators eat only a proportion of what is available.
E is the amount of energy (calories) from a prey item. h is the handling time, which includes capture, killing, eating and digesting. h starts once the prey has been spotted. E/h is therefore the profitability of the prey item.
Animals typically eat the most profitable prey types more than would be expected by chance since it will appear in the diet at a higher proportion than it is encountered in the environment. Predators do not, however, eat only the most profitable prey types. Other prey types may be easier to find, and E is not the only nutritional requirement. Toxins may be present in many prey types, therefore variability of diet prevents any one toxin from reaching dangerous levels. There are also other essential nutrients in all organism's diets, so it is clear that an approach focusing only on energy intake will not provide an adequate model.
Read more about this topic: Optimal Foraging Theory
Famous quotes containing the words basic, variables and/or oft:
“The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance—Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for instance, is always greater than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being performed.”
—André Previn (b. 1929)
“The variables are surprisingly few.... One can whip or be whipped; one can eat excrement or quaff urine; mouth and private part can be meet in this or that commerce. After which there is the gray of morning and the sour knowledge that things have remained fairly generally the same since man first met goat and woman.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“In my school-days, when I had lost one shaft,
I shot his fellow of the self-same flight
The self-same way with more advised watch
To find the other forth, and by adventuring both
I oft found both.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)