Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

) All animals must eat. Their feeding behaviour can tell us much about the conditions in which they live and how they adapt to these conditions. In my research programme I ask why animals change their feeding strategies and what consequences these changes have on their survival. ) I am specifically interested in the amount of food which an animal will leave behind when it stops eating. This left-over food can indicate the level of competition which the animal experiences, the amount of food available in its environment, the risk of predation or the amount of energy required to exploit the food. ) By measuring the amount of food which animals forego eating under various circumstances, I propose to acquire information which will allow us to better understand how animals make decisions and about the way in which these decisions influence population growth and biodiversity. ) Specifically, I will examine social interactions in which some animals exploit the food found by others rather than looking for their own source of food. I am interested in the evolution of this scrounging behaviour and in its effects on population growth and species coexistence within ecological communities. I predict, based on mathematical models, that when animals find it profitable to scrounge food from others, their population growth rate will decline and they will more easily coexist with other species, both prey and competitors. ) This work will allow me to continue to study the mechanisms which allow species to coexist within communities and thus maintain local species diversity. It will also complement my use of mathematical models to estimate local habitat based on animal's feeding behaviour. ) This work should of interest to behavioural ecologists, to wildlife managers and to conservation biologists because it will have implications at the individual level, the population level and the community level. My past work in this field has also influenced work in anthropology and psychology.