Adaptive Individuals and Population Ecology

This chapter provides an overview of adaptive trade-off behaviors, which are common in natural systems and probably often important, as illustrated by the large body of research that has used giving-up food densities to quantify predation risk across a broad range of taxa. Adaptive trade-off behaviors can range from short-term decisions such as habitat and activity selection, to midterm responses such as energy allocation, to seasonal decisions such as when and where to migrate, to irreversible life-history decisions such as whether to enter a reproductive state. Understanding and quantifying the importance of adaptive trade-off behavior has been a major theme of ecology in recent decades. The chapter then reviews the different models and publications that have addressed the problem of modeling populations and communities of adaptive individuals, one example of which are individual-based models. It also considers the importance of physiology and neurobiology to adaptive behavior, and introduces the state- and prediction-based theory.