Many attempts to relate animal foraging patterns to landscape heterogeneity
are focused on the analysis of foragers movements. Resource detection patterns
in space and time are not commonly studied, yet they are tightly coupled to
landscape properties and add relevant information on foraging behavior. By
exploring simple foraging models in unpredictable environments we show that the
distribution of intervals between detected prey (detection statistics)is mostly
determined by the spatial structure of the prey field and essentially distinct
from predator displacement statistics. Detections are expected to be Poissonian
in uniform random environments for markedly different foraging movements (e.g.
L\'evy and ballistic). This prediction is supported by data on the time
intervals between diving events on short-range foraging seabirds such as the
thick-billed murre ({\it Uria lomvia}). However, Poissonian detection
statistics is not observed in long-range seabirds such as the wandering
albatross ({\it Diomedea exulans}) due to the fractal nature of the prey field,
covering a wide range of spatial scales. For this scenario, models of fractal
prey fields induce non-Poissonian patterns of detection in good agreement with
two albatross data sets. We find that the specific shape of the distribution of
time intervals between prey detection is mainly driven by meso and
submeso-scale landscape structures and depends little on the forager strategy
or behavioral responses.Comment: Submitted first to PLoS-ONE on 26/9/2011. Final version published on
14/04/201
