Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY
Volume 218, Issue 8, Pages 1175-1179Publisher
COMPANY OF BIOLOGISTS LTD
DOI: 10.1242/jeb.116533
Keywords
Decision making; Foraging; Protist; Rules of thumb; Sampling; Unicellular
Categories
Funding
- Australian Research Council [DP110102998, DP0878924, FT120100120]
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Branco Weiss Society in Science Fellowship
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Animals foraging in patchy, non-renewing or slowly renewing environments must make decisions about how long to remain within a patch. Organisms can use heuristics ('rules of thumb') based on available information to decide when to leave the patch. Here, we investigated proximate patch-departure heuristics in two species of giant, brainless amoeba: the slime moulds Didymium bahiense and Physarum polycephalum. We explicitly tested the importance of information obtained through experience by eliminating chemosensory cues of patch quality. In P. polycephalum, patch departure was influenced by the consumption of high, and to a much lesser extent low, quality food items such that engulfing a food item increased patch-residency time. Physarum polycephalum also tended to forage for longer in darkened, 'safe' patches. In D. bahiense, engulfment of any food item increased patch residency irrespective of that food item's quality. Exposure to light had no effect on the patch-residency time of D. bahiense. Given that these organisms lack a brain, our results illustrate how the use of simple heuristics can give the impression that individuals make sophisticated foraging decisions.
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