Selection of food items

Responses to encountered food

Diet selection in adult vertebrates proves to be largely the result of individual learning processes that guide the genetically determined response potentialities of the newborn individual into certain definite channels.

Innate responsiveness appears to be broad in species that forage for themselves from birth and thus must deal with many different food situations. The pecking of newly hatched chicks of domestic fowl at all kinds of small objects, edible or not, is an example. Yet these chicks have certain innate preferences for colour and other features. Such preferences may foreshadow the composition of adult diets. In newly hatched snakes, for instance, feeding responses are more easily elicited with extracts of the natural food of adults of the same species than with preparations of food of closely related species. In contrast, colour preferences of ducklings of different species are similar, although the adult diets differ.

Innate responsiveness may be narrow, however, in young vertebrates for whom the parent is the only source of food. Herring-gull chicks beg for food in response to a few “sign stimuli” provided only by the parent’s head among all objects in the natural habitat. Sucking behaviour of newborn mammals is a somewhat comparable example. In such cases, responsiveness must be profoundly reorganized when the individual forages on its own.

Responsiveness is channelled into the adult pattern through experience of taste, nutritional value, and possible noxious properties of various objects. In this way the individual is able to attach a definite palatability rating to each type of food regularly encountered and to associate this with visual or other characters by which it recognizes objects from a distance. As demonstrated in experiments, insectivorous birds may discriminate precisely among as many as 40 different prey species in this manner.

In addition to palatability, detectability of food objects is a factor in diet selection. This has been studied in detail in visually foraging vertebrates. Detectability of an object depends on its degree of contrast with the background as to colour, shape, and movement. The individual predator can learn to detect prey that it finds only with difficulty at first; such “searching image formation” occurs only if the prey is palatable and encountered often.

Finally, responses to encountered prey also depend on (1) the hunger level of the individual and (2) its experience regarding the general food situation. Hungrier predators have lower palatability requirements and may take greater risks to secure prey. At one and the same hunger level, a prey of slight palatability may be rejected if the predator “knows” that further search will probably bring better food but accepted if it “knows” that nothing tastier is available. As a result of these two influences, animals concentrate during scarcity on food scorned in times of plenty.

Food searching and diet

The general type of food taken is often determined by the innate search method of the animal and the section of the whole habitat being exploited. A fish-eating bird, such as the osprey (Pandion haliaetus), which secures prey by diving into water (but not swimming), is limited in its diet to fish species that are active near the surface. The question of whether food searching is random is relevant here, for certain kinds of nonrandomness can influence diets. No simple answer can be given. Search must be random in the sense that oriented reactions to food objects can be made only after detection; at the same time, however, the search may be systematic in that (1) places not recently traversed are favoured over those just unsuccessfully explored, and (2) the locality where a prey has just been caught or seen may be searched with special attention. Further, (3) it is common for individuals to restrict their foraging to parts of the home range where ample food has been previously found, although exploration of other parts is interspersed and may change the destination of further trips if successful. In all, food searching appears to have sufficient nonrandomness to influence diets provided that different kinds of food concentrate in different parts of the home range.

To sum up, vertebrate diet selection is largely molded by learning processes. Insofar as their course depends on chance experiences of individuals, differences in diet may develop even among members of one population of a species. On the whole, however, patterns of food selection are typical of the species, as all its members have similar genetic makeup and live in broadly similar ecological situations.