AND RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Abstract

The behavior of predators, both natural and human, must be influenced to some extent by the need to obtain information pertaining to the location and abundance of their prey. If prey items are uniformly distributed at random throughout the entire environment, then no particular search strategy is of any avail. (If predation depletes the prey in localized areas, then the uniform distribution is upset, and strategy may become important.) In the vast majority of cases, however, the distribution of prey is patchy, and this fact opens up a number of questions of strategic nature for the predator. (The possibility of aggregation of prey also opens up strategic considerations for the ~, but this is not our present concern.) For example, how much time should the predator spend feeding in a given patch? -- this question has been addressed in the literature on optimal foraging theory (Charnov 1976, Oaten 1977, Green 1980, Iwasa et al 1981, ~-1cNair 1982). If patch locations are known to the predator, but the quality of the patches is uncertain, in what order should the patches be sampled (Mangel and Clark 1983, Clark and ~·lange1 1983)? If patch location or quality is uncertain, would