Mechanisms of foraging in mammalian herbivores: new models of functional response.

The outcome of many high-order processes in ecology depends on the way in which the abundance and distribution of plants affect the eating rate of mammalian herbivores. However, simple, mechanistic models describing the operation of the functional response of these animals have failed to emerge. We offer new models describing the effects of spatial and morphological characteristics of plants on the intake rate of plant tissue by mammalian herbivores feeding within plant patches. We structure our models to respond to three patterns of plant availability: (1) spatially dispersed, apparent plants; (2) spatially dispersed, nonapparent plants; and (3) spatially concentrated plants. We depart from the traditional representations of predator functional response in assuming that searching for food and processing it can overlap in time. Our models illustrate that several distinct mechanisms can account for Type II functional responses frequently seen in herbivores. We show how differences among these mechanisms can explain anomalies in the empirical literature on regulation of intake rate of mammalian herbivores including divergence in functional responses between grazers and browsers, linear functional response curves, and curves showing zero slope throughout the domain of food availability.