FORAGING BEHAVIOR SIMULATION SOFTWARE

FORAGING BEHAVIOR AND ITS INTERACTIONS WITH THE ENVIRONMENT ARE COMPLEX AND MULTI-DIMENSIONAL. SIMULATION HELPS LABORATORY BIOLOGIST AND FIELD ECOLOGISTS WORK WITH DATA AND THEORETICAL MODELS TO GAIN INSIGHTS INTO BEHAVIORAL MECHANISMS. THE INCREASING POWER OF DESKTOP COMPUTERS IS BRINGING COMPUTER SIMULATION TECHNOLOGY TO A NEW LEVEL OF ACCESSIBILITY. THE USE OF SIMULATION IN FORAGING BEHAVIOR RESEARCH IS IN ITS INFANCY; THERE IS GREAT POTENTIAL FOR ITS USE IN REPRESENTATION AND INTERPRETATION OF ACTUAL AND SIMULATED EXPERIMENTS. IT IS CLEAR THAT WITH APPROPRIATE BBEHAVIOR SIMULATION MODELS, BIOLOGISTS AND ECOLOGISTS CAN MAKE SIGNIFICANT ADVANCES IN UNDERSTANDING FORAGING PROCESSES. THE GOAL IS TO EVALUATE SIMULATION TECHNIQUES FOR A PROTOTYPE FORAGING BEHAVIOR SIMULATION MODEL. THE APPROACH IS TO DEVELOP A SHELL PROGRAM THAT ALLOWS USERS TO SPECIFY FORAGING EXPERIMENTS. RESEARCHERS ARE EVALUATING SIMULATION TECHNIQUES AND ALGORITHMS FOR THEIR SPECIFIC APPLICATION TO BEHAVIORAL PROCESSES. THE PROJECT REQUIRES ORIGINAL RESEARCH ON THE QUESTION OF HOW TO SIMULATE PHENOMENA SUCH AS DECISIONS AND SPATIAL BEHAVIOR.