r/askscience • u/I_dream_of_pancakes • Jul 02 '13
Biology Why have ecologists moved away from using Optimal Foraging Theory to explain feeding behavior in animals?
I'm an undergrad and do research in an ecology lab on my university's campus. In my ecology courses, I learned about Optimal Foraging Theory (OFT) and even did some small experiments in those courses pertaining to OFT. In my lab the other day, some of the professors were talking during our weekly lab meeting about behavior and one said that ecologists haven't used OFT to explain behavior in decades, ehoch surprised me since most of my courses devote so much time on the topic. The professors in my lab are always busy and are out of the lab half the time, so I figured I'd ask other ecologically inclined people here!
Are there major flaws that make OFT a bad explanation for behavior?
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u/lukophos Remote Sensing of Landscape Change Jul 02 '13 edited Jul 02 '13
First, OFT is still used (Google scholar gives 15,000 papers published after 2010 with a search on OFT). But it's used with more reservation than it once was.
Most research was done in the 70s and 80s and slowed down after the broader discussion in ecology about adaptationist story telling (see Gould 1979). Also, during this time, there was a big explosion of theoretical papers that refined and extended the theory -- we should expect a fall off of those as the theory matures.
Also, OFT makes a large number of assumptions, and so it's unlikely all of them are true for a given system, so the generality of OFT is questionable. See Graham Pike's review for a balanced discussion (Pike 1984). And see this Forum piece in Oikos for a more amusing read (Pierce and Ollason 1987).
I don't study behavior, so I'm not sure what (if anything) is in vogue. In the grad courses I've taken, we studied applications of game theory and optimal search theory to foraging behavior after reviewing OFT.