Topic: Marginal Value Theorem

To successfully forage for food, animals much balance the energetic cost of searching for and traveling between food sources with the energetic benefit of exploiting those sources. The Marginal Value Theorem (MVT) provides one normative account of this balance by specifying that a forager should leave a food patch when its energetic yield falls below the average yield of other patches in the environment. This framework and its extensions treat the decision of when and how fast to leave a patch under the assumption that other patches exist and are readily reachable. However, in natural settings

Foraging is a complex behavior vital for survival regularly involving memory anddecision-making to optimize costs and benefits. How long should an animal stay near a foodsource, and when should it move to a better food patch? In this poster, we investigate pigeons’foraging behavior testing predictions from the marginal value theorem (MVT) in a well-controlled environment with 3D pose tracking. We used DeepLabCut to analyze the behaviorof twelve homing pigeons in a 4sqm arena with two separate food patches. We manipulatedthe elevation of the food patches to investigate foraging strategies condi