Evolutionarily Stable Strategies for Consuming a Structured Resource

abstract: A general consumer-resource model assuming discrete consumers and a continuously structured resource is examined. We study two foraging behaviors, which lead to ®xed and ¯exible patch residence times, in conjunction with a simple consumer energetics model linking resource consumption, foraging behavior, and meta-bolic costs. Results indicate a single, evolutionarily stable foraging strategy for ®xed and ¯exible foraging in a nonspatial environment, but ¯exible foraging in a spatial environment leads to consumer grouping, which affects the resource distribution such that no single foraging strategy can exclude all other strategies. This evolutionarily stable coexistence of multiple foraging strategies may help explain a dichotomous pattern observed in a wide variety of natural systems