| Автор | Benedix, J. H. |
| Дата выпуска | 1993 |
| dc.description | Because pocket gophers have the high energetic cost of excavating burrows and an inability to detect distant food items through the soil, I hypothesized that individuals within established burrow systems would use area-restricted search as a foraging strategy. To examine this hypothesis I compared gopher foraging effort over a 10-month period between areas in which overall plant densities were experimentally varied. Gophers expended approximately 50% of their foraging effort in areas with the highest plant density, even though these made up only 33% of the available area in experimental plots. In large, gridded areas sampled for an entire season as well as in small areas in which gophers foraged for less than 1 week, gopher foraging effort was related to the density of a single leguminous plant species, Psoralea argophylla. In small plots where this plant species was at high density, gophers created more tunnel branches, thereby intensifying their search effort. Thus, area-restricted search appears to increase the rate of encounter with the patchily distributed Psoralea plants. |
| Формат | application.pdf |
| Издатель | Oxford University Press |
| Копирайт | © 1993 International Society for Behavioral Ecology |
| Тема | foraging |
| Тема | pocket gopher |
| Тема | Geomys bursarius |
| Тема | area restricted search |
| Тема | Psorela[Behav Ecol 4:318–324 (1993)] |
| Тема | Articles |
| Название | Area-restricted search by the plains pocket gopher (Geomys bursarius) in tallgrass prairie habitat |
| Тип | research-article |
| Electronic ISSN | 1465-7279 |
| Print ISSN | 1045-2249 |
| Журнал | Behavioral Ecology |
| Том | 4 |
| Первая страница | 318 |
| Последняя страница | 324 |
| Аффилиация | Division of Biology, Kansas State UniversityManhattan, KS 66502, USA |
| Выпуск | 4 |
