Foraging: Behavior and Ecology provides a unique and up-to-date reference covering an astonishingly diverse set of topics ranging from neuron molecular biology and brain structures to population dynamics and community structure—quite an impressive sweep. This book, intended for graduate students looking for a research project, is ideal for use in graduate seminars or advanced undergraduate reading courses. It is also addressed to researchers who want to get the current picture of the area of foraging behavior.

The three editors are established players in foraging research. David W. Stephens, professor of ecology, evolution, and behavior at the University of Minnesota, coauthored (with John Krebs) Foraging Theory (Princeton University Press, 1986), which became the ninth most cited book in evolution and ecology. He is also known for his work on the cognitive processes of blue jay foraging decisions. Joel S. Brown, a biology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is a coauthor (with Thomas L. Vincent) of Evolutionary Game Theory, Natural Selection, and Darwinian Dynamics (Cambridge University Press, 2005); he is well known for having introduced the concept of giving-up density as a means of measuring the costs that animals experience while exploiting diverse habitat types. Ronald C. Ydenberg is a professor in the Behavioral Ecology Research Group and director of the Center for Wildlife Ecology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He is well known for his research on provisioning and the application of behavioral ecology to phenomena such as avian diving, territoriality, and foraging, as well as for his work in the analysis of metabolic rate and population dynamics.

Writing a synthesis of foraging theory in the early 1980s may have been a rather straightforward task, given the small number of basic models and empirical investigations that characterized the field, but at the turn of the millennium, that task is completely different—and most likely daunting—because the field has exploded into a surprisingly diverse set of research programs and traditions.

So what should be included in such a new synthesis of contemporary foraging research? Clearly, the synthesis should present a greater integration of neural mechanisms and cognition into foraging behavior. It should also be clear that those physiological mechanisms of digestion and energy management that have long been ignored by foraging behavioral ecologists must be brought to the forefront. It would be unthinkable for such a book not to update certain problems of classic foraging theory without also dealing with more recently formulated social foraging questions. Finally, the long-unfulfilled promise must be met: the book must deal with the population-level phenomena that foraging theory was meant to address in the first place. Foraging: Behavior and Ecology does all of this in four parts.

To cover such a broad diversity of subjects would be nearly impossible for a single author, so Stephens, Brown, and Ydenberg invited a team of 27 contributors to help them achieve their goal. However, calling upon such a team of collaborators, which includes both senior and junior scientists, leads to a problem frequently found in edited volumes: the uneven depth of treatment of issues and the different writing styles turn the book, at least in some parts, into a quilt of topics rather than a unified whole. Most chapters were simply delightful to read, and I learned a great deal from them. A few, unfortunately, failed to capture my attention, as I kept wondering why I was being told what I was being told. The editors apparently worked very hard to overcome this unevenness by insisting that each chapter start with a clear, vivid natural history example of the topics the chapter would cover. These chapter openings are universally interesting.

The construction of Foraging is innovative. The editors asked some contributors to write full-length chapters, whereas others were invited to compose boxes for presentation within the chapters; the boxes provide either a review of a related topic, some introductory material, or more specialized accounts of specific topics. This innovation works well. The numerous halftones by Todd Telander give the book a pleasing visual quality (which reminded me of the illustrated adventure books of my childhood). In general, Foraging is a good piece of workmanship with an impressive bibliography and nice graphs, but I must point out that typographical glitches—Greek letters missing in the text and in the equations of chapter 2— marred my cloth edition. An errata sheet inserted in the paperback version took care of that problem, so if you buy a copy, make sure it comes with the errata sheet.

I highly recommend this book to all who study foraging. Graduate students will find a wide array of fascinating questions about foraging, from the neurological pathways of the ventral unpaired median neurons to cognitive maps, digestive physiology, impulsiveness foraging games, food hoarding and provisioning, the cycling of predators and prey populations, trophic cascades, isobars, and giving-up densities and conservation strategies, to name a few. Researchers and faculty members will find a convenient source of updated information on foraging theory and foraging behavior.

Reading Foraging will surely conjure up exciting discussion topics. For instance, as I read chapters on brains and foraging behavior, I wondered whether it could be possible for mechanisms to be of general interest, given that they so often seem specific to each of the extremely diverse set of taxa being studied. Perhaps the persistent calls for greater study of mechanisms in behavioral ecology are dangerous sirens luring behavioral ecology toward the same end that ethology met only a few decades before? At that time, many ethologists abandoned proximate questions of mechanisms to embrace a behavioral ecology that boasted a more general and exciting functional approach. Stephens, Brown, and Ydenberg have demonstrated that foraging is most certainly not a depleted research patch. It is rich, and offers a diverse set of questions moving into a wide range of research traditions. Make sure you read it.