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area-restricted search scap uti bsta domains, and rarely has it considered foraging paths involving directional choices driven by memory and al dom e time so-ca landscapes, a general representation of prey items as points in a continuous, two-dimensional space is needed. In this context of continuous spatial prey distributions, assessing the optimality of a predator’s feeding strategy given a set of constraints (e.g. handling relating directional choices to behavioural states (Scharf et al. 2007). Movement models based on random walks are frequently used to model foraging paths in two-dimensional habitats (Turchin 1998). Here ‘random ’ does not mean that animals actually make their choice of direction at random, but merely that given the potentially large number of unknown factors involved, stochastic modelling is a parsimonious description of the sequence of direc-tional choices during a foraging trip. Random walk models are diverse and have a long history of applications to describ