Patch-leaving decisions
When should an animal abandon a depleting resource? Using a two-patch foraging task grounded in the marginal value theorem, we study the stay-or-leave decision in freely moving rats — and how it is shaped by sex, social experience, and gonadal hormones.
Papers & preprints
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Social isolation biases female rats toward safety-oriented, efficient foraging
Preprint · bioRxiv (posted July 3, 2026)
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[Manuscript title — provide]
In review — gonadectomy has little effect on patch-leaving decision-making.
The question
Optimal foraging theory predicts a precise moment to leave a depleting patch — the point at which its instantaneous return falls to the average return of the environment. Animals rarely behave optimally, and the direction and size of their deviations are informative. We ask how the patch-leaving decision is made, and which biological and experiential factors move it.
Approach
Rats forage in a two-patch environment with diminishing returns, allowing us to quantify leaving times against the marginal value theorem's optimum. We find that rats systematically overstay the optimal leaving time, and that the magnitude of this overstaying varies reliably across conditions — giving us a behavioral handle on the factors that tune foraging efficiency.
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