Adaptive foragers and community ecology: Scaling individuals to communities

Ecologists have long appreciated the many ways that adaptive behavior can influence the ecology of individuals and populations. The integration of adaptive foraging into community and ecosystem ecology has been far less complete, but recent advances indicate how the behavior of individuals can influence the properties of food webs. Behavioral avoidance of predators, optimal foraging by predators, and habitat selection to avoid or facilitate various interspecific interactions can provide important insights into the ways that behavior can influence community patterns, both locally or in extended metacommunities. Although optimal foraging theory originated in part as way to understand differences in the diets of coexisting competitors, the adaptive behavioral mechanisms underpinning phenomena like consumptive competitive ability and keystone predation remain incompletely understood. Other kinds of large scale temporal and spatial variation in the identity and activity foragers pose particular challenges for the development of community theory.