Fish foraging behaviour in theory and practice

As with all animals, finding food is a continuous task for fish. Selection pressure on food finding behaviour, or foraging, is intense. The main preoccupation of early investigations was with the mechanisms and structures that animals use to gather food and to process it once consumed. In broad terms, it was recognized that different types of prey demanded different styles of finding and capturing food (e.g., Norman, 1936, Chapters 6 and 7). The main deficiency in this approach was that there was no attempt to understand why fish had evolved such structures or processes.