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Optimal Foraging

Optimal Foraging

How animals obtain and eat their food is called foraging behavior. Foraging can include searching for plants and hunting for prey and depends on the species and environment.

Instinctive Drift

Instinctive Drift

Instinctive drift refers to the tendency of animals to revert to their innate behaviors despite repeated reinforcement. Breland and Breland demonstrated this concept in an experiment with a raccoon. The raccoon was trained to pick up two coins and place them in a container in exchange for food. Initially, the raccoon learned to associate the coins with food, making them a conditioned stimulus or a substitute for food. However, over time, the raccoon became less willing to put the coins into the...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 28, 2026

A Complex Diving-For-Food Task to Investigate Social Organization and Interactions in Rats

A Complex Diving-For-Food Task to Investigate Social Organization and Interactions in Rats

Published on: May 8, 2021

Foraging by rats: Intuitions, models, data.

P R Killeen¹, M Riggsford

¹Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA.

Behavioural Processes

|June 5, 2014

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Rats learned to hoard more food when sites were farther away, regardless of terrain difficulty. Their persistence in foraging patches was influenced by the availability of food in other areas.

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Area of Science:

Behavioral Ecology
Animal Behavior
Foraging Theory

Background:

Understanding foraging strategies is crucial for behavioral ecology.
Rats (Rattus norvegicus) provide a model organism for studying resource acquisition.
Optimality models predict animal behavior based on maximizing fitness.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how distance and terrain affect food hoarding in rats.
To examine the influence of alternative patch richness on foraging persistence.
To refine optimality models using empirical data from rat behavior.

Main Methods:

Rats were trained to operate levers for food rewards at varying distances.
Hoard size was measured in relation to site distance and elevation changes (uphill/downhill).
Foraging patch persistence was observed in relation to the quality of alternative patches.

Main Results:

Hoard size increased significantly with the distance to the food site.
Terrain (uphill/downhill) did not affect the size of the accumulated hoard.
Patch residence time was dependent on the richness of alternative foraging sites.

Conclusions:

Rats adjust hoarding behavior based on travel cost (distance) but not energetic cost (terrain).
Foraging decisions are influenced by the perceived value of alternative resources, supporting patch-choice models.
The study provides empirical support for and refinements to optimal foraging theory in rats.