Скачать или смотреть Native Species successfully Adapt to Human Encroachment on their Habitat

To avoid extinction, native species will rely increasingly on their ability to adapt to human-dominated habitats. Will the behaviors that evolved in natural circumstances help species make the transition? Or will they be maladaptive?

These questions were addressed in an article entitled "Optimal Foraging of Little Egrets and Their Prey in a Foraging Game in a Patchy Environment," detailing the experiment was published recently in The American Naturalist.

An artificial habitat with little egrets (the predator) and common goldfish (its prey) help to pose this question usefully. The two species were playing a predation game in which their best tactics depended on how the other species was behaving. The fish, needing to collect their own food in the open water, had to solve the problem of timing their exposure to predation by the egrets. The egrets had to adjust their behavior so that they captured the fish at the highest possible rate given the behavior of the fish.

Optimal foraging theory predicted the behaviors of the two species.

Despite the entirely unfamiliar setting, the egrets matched the quantitative behavioral predictions of optimality theory. And the goldfish behaved at least qualitatively in accordance with it.