Authors: Keren Embar Ashael Raveh Darren Burns Burt P Kotler
Publish Date: 2014/05/09
Volume: 175, Issue: 3, Pages: 825-834
Abstract
In a foraging game predators must catch elusive prey while avoiding injury Predators manage their hunting success with behavioral tools such as habitat selection time allocation and perhaps daring—the willingness to risk injury to increase hunting success A predator’s level of daring should be state dependent the hungrier it is the more it should be willing to risk injury to better capture prey We ask in a foraging game will a hungry predator be more willing to risk injury while hunting We performed an experiment in an outdoor vivarium in which barn owls Tyto alba were allowed to hunt Allenby’s gerbils Gerbillus andersoni allenbyi from a choice of safe and risky patches Owls were either well fed or hungry representing the high and low state respectively We quantified the owls’ patch use behavior We predicted that hungry owls would be more daring and allocate more time to the risky patches Owls preferred to hunt in the safe patches This indicates that owls manage risk of injury by avoiding the risky patches Hungry owls doubled their attacks on gerbils but directed the added effort mostly toward the safe patch and the safer open areas in the risky patch Thus owls dared by performing a risky action—the attack maneuver—more times but only in the safest places—the open areas We conclude that daring can be used to manage risk of injury and owls implement it strategically in ways we did not foresee to minimize risk of injury while maximizing hunting successWe thank the United StatesIsrael Binational Science Foundation grant no 2008163 to Burt P Kotler and Joel S Brown for generous support of this research We thank two anonymous referees for providing useful comments that improved the manuscript This is publication no 833 of the Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology
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