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- Title
Animal response to nested self-similar patches: a test with woolly bears.
- Authors
McClure, Mark F.; Shipley, Lisa A.
- Abstract
To gain insight into how animals respond to resource patchiness at different spatial scales, we envision their responses in environments comprised of nested, self-similar patches. In these environments, all resources reside within the smallest patches, and resource density declines as a constant exponent of patch size. Accordingly, we use simple mathematical formulations to describe a self-similar environment and a null model of how animals should respond to this environment if they do not perceive resource distribution. We then argue that animals that can perceive resource distribution should partition space by reducing the relative time searching between patches as patch size increases. On an experimental landscape, we found that woolly bear caterpillars Grammia geneura could partition space in this manner, but the range of patch sizes over which they did so tended to increase with resource aggregation. Nevertheless, scaling efficiency (i.e. the scaling of search time versus the scaling or resource density) was similar in all distributions when averaged over all patch sizes. These disparate patterns with similar outcomes resulted from differences in caterpillars’ abilities to discriminate spatially among patches of different sizes via their movement pathways, and differences in their use of speed to detect resource items. Our work is relevant to the characterization of resource availability from an animal's perspective, and to the linking of optimal foraging theory to the modeling of search behavior.
- Subjects
WOOLLY bears (Lepidoptera); ANIMAL adaptation; CATERPILLARS; NATURAL resources; PHENOTYPIC plasticity; ANIMAL ecology; NULL models (Ecology)
- Publication
Oikos, 2009, Vol 118, Issue 5, p653
- ISSN
0030-1299
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1600-0706.2008.17117.x