Information acquisition and time allocation in insect parasitoids

All animals face the problem of finding resources for growth, maintenance and reproduction. Foraging in a heterogeneous (i.e. patchy) environment requires seemingly complex decisions, such as where to forage, and for how long. To make such decisions, animals need to acquire relevant information from their environment. Recent studies of how parasitoids acquire information and allocate their time to the exploitation of host patches use a combination of functional (evolutionary) and causal (mechanistic) approaches. They show that parasitoids can allocate foraging time to patches in an adaptive way and that members of the same species can respond differently to the same environmental cues, depending on their physiological state and previous experiences or on genetic differences. Functional models now help to explain these contrasting responses.