Provisioning Time and Central-place Foraging in Beavers

Authors
John Fryxell
C.M. Doucet
Resource Date:
1991
Page Length
6

This study tested the effect of provisioning time by providing beavers in experimental enclosures with equal frequencies of saplings at various distances from the lodge and we compared the patterns of resource use
with the predictions from an explicit model of central-place foraging. In this paper, we provide experimental estimates of parameters for a model of optimal diet breadth in beavers, as a function of distance from the lodge. We then test model predictions of the mean and variance in size of exploited items as a function of distance, by experimental trials with three woody plant species.