Simple models of adaptive foragers: Few species and population stability

Adaptive behavior can have a variety of impacts in simple food webs.  The effects of predator and prey behaviors in simple food webs of 6 or fewer species will be analyzed and classified.  Adjustment of foraging effort, adaptive defense, choice of food and defense, and habitat choice are the main categories of behavior treated.  I focus on mechanisms that can result in fluctuating densities.  Saturating predator functional responses are involved in the majority of mechanisms that are capable of producing cycles in either density or location or both.  Several different models for the dynamics of behavioral change are introduced and their impacts on food web dynamics are analyzed.  The accuracy and rate of adaptive change often has a major effect on system dynamics, particularly in systems in which the adaptive behavior is habitat choice.  These results constitute a strong argument for increased empirical study of the behavioral dynamics of interacting species.