A badger living in Oklahoma could hunt for either scorpions or ground squirrels

Question

A badger living in Oklahoma could hunt for either scorpions or ground squirrels (or both). Scorpions provide only 10 calories each, but require only 2 minutes to find, on average, with an additional 3 minutes to remove the stinger; ground squirrels offer 1000 calories, but take an average of 3 hours to find and an additional 90 minutes to capture, kill, and consume. If the badger's ultimate goal is to maximize its rate of caloric gain, should it forage for squirrels, scorpions, or both? Show your math.

Explanation / Answer

A ground squirrel yields 1000 calories in 4.5 hours in all. In this same period, hunting scorpions would produce only 120 calories per hour, or 540 calories over all. So even though the rate of prey capture is much greater for the scorpion hunter, the badger would do much better going after ground squirrels.

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