FOOD PERISHABILITY AND INVENTORY MANAGEMENT - A COMPARISON OF 3 CACHING STRATEGIES

Food stored for an extended period may change substantially in value (e.g., ripen or spoil). Consequently, when selecting food for a long-term cache, an animal should consider what the value of each food item will be when it is eaten rather than when it is collected. This point adds considerable complexity to the problem of food selection compared with the situation addressed by most prey choice models. Beginning with the premise that an animal should store no more of a food type than can be consumed before the remainder spoils, we developed a numerical computer simulation to evaluate three cache management strategies under various conditions of food availability and duration of the cache use period. On the basis of deterioration rates, the simulation predicts how much of each food type an animal should store. The results indicate that animals should adjust the composition of their cache to reflect food perishability and that no one inventory strategy is optimal under ah conditions.