Further development of the Spalinger-Hobbs mechanistic foraging model for free-ranging moose

Spalinger and Hobbs proposed a mechanistic model of forage intake based on the mutually exclusive actions of biting and chewing. A necessary consequence of this model is that an animal postpones the intake of more food by biting when it is processing food by chewing. In previous work, the Spalinger-Hobbs model successfully predicted short-term intake in controlled experiments. Application of the model to an entire foraging bout requires the following assumptions: (i) biting and chewing are independent events; (ii) there are no periodicities in the length of consecutive bite or chew sequences; (iii) the average bite size is constant; and (iv) the bite rate does not change with the number of bites in the sequence. To test these assumptions, we videotaped entire foraging bouts of two free-ranging moose (Alces alces) feeding on dense swards of Epilobium angustifolium in midsummer. From these videotapes, we measured the time spent biting and chewing, the rates of biting and chewing, the frequency distributions...

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