The last three rows demonstrated the crucial counterintuitive prediction that small prey would be excluded from the diet, independently of their encounter rate, if the encounter rate with large prey were above a certain quantifiable threshold. Those were heady days! Setting aside the fact that the small prey were not totally ignored, it seemed as though a very simple, testable model, derived from a few starting assumptions about rate maximization and constraints on foraging, could actually predicthowan animal responded in an experiment. It’s hard to overstate the excitement at the time
