Search tactics and frequency-dependent prey detection
Article Abstract:
The examination of the consequences of variable tactics in the context of a common mode of searching for food, known as pause-travel search, reveals that variable tactics generate positive frequency-dependent encounter rates. Frequency-dependent predation has important evolutionary and ecological consequences related to genotypic and phenotypic diversities, for it regulates the cryptic and mimetic prey populations within communities. Within mixtures of cryptic prey the process includes variable perceptual sensitivity and variable search tactics. Search tactics bias the way a food gatherer experiences its surroundings, and variable pause-travel tactics varies the bias in ways that create either positive or negative frequency-dependent detection rates.
Publication Name: The American Naturalist
Subject: Earth sciences
ISSN: 0003-0147
Year: 1993
User Contributions:
Comment about this article or add new information about this topic:
Search, discrimination, and selection: mate choice by pied flycatchers
Article Abstract:
The deception hypothesis, according to which female pied flycatchers' incapacity to select mates is due to the indiscernible nature of male mating status, and the search cost hypothesis, according to which male mating status is desirable but high search costs render selectivity uneconomical, help explain the females' partial inability to choose mates. Mated males form secondary territories and become secondary mates by courting late-arriving females. Females mating with unmated males, dwelling in primary locations, have the capacity to reproduce more.
Publication Name: The American Naturalist
Subject: Earth sciences
ISSN: 0003-0147
Year: 1995
User Contributions:
Comment about this article or add new information about this topic:
The maintenance of phenotypic plasticity as a signal detection problem
Article Abstract:
A 1992 paper by N.A. Moran focuses on the role of cues in phenotypic plasticity, or the conditional expression of different phenotypes by a given genotype in different environments. Moran concludes that such cues are instrumental in limiting condition developmental switching. Although Moran deserves praise for her scholarly paper, the probabilistic relationship between environmental cues and environmental quality she posits can be understood better if it is thought of as a signal detection process.
Publication Name: The American Naturalist
Subject: Earth sciences
ISSN: 0003-0147
Year: 1996
User Contributions:
Comment about this article or add new information about this topic:
- Abstracts: Testing hypotheses about evolutionary change on single branches of a phylogeny using evolutionary contrasts. The evolution of dispersal in spatially and temporally varying environments
- Abstracts: Crustal and upper mantle velocity structure of the Salton Trough, southeast California. Host rock rheology controls on the emplacement of tabular intrusions: implications for underplating of extending crust
- Abstracts: Parallel speciation by natural selection. Using phylogenies to test macroevolutionary hypotheses of trait evolution in cranes (Gruinae)
- Abstracts: The stratigraphy, correlation, provenance and palaeogeography of the Skiddaw Group (Ordovician) in the English Lake District
- Abstracts: The effects of recurrent clonal formation on clonal invasion patterns and sexual persistence: a Monte Carlo simulation of the frozen niche-variation model