Dietary conservatism[1] is a foraging strategy in which individuals show a prolonged reluctance to eat novel foods, even after neophobia has been overcome.
Within any given population of foragers, some will be conservative and some will be adventurous, an alternative strategy in which individuals readily accept novel food immediately after neophobia has waned.
Dietary conservatism and neophobia are however distinct processes,[2] distinguished by the persistence of an individual's reluctance to eat over repeated encounters with novel food and over long time periods.
Dietary conservatism has been described in a range of vertebrate species including birds: Zebra Finch,[7] Japanese quail,[5] common blackbird,[1] European robin, both in the wild[8] and in captivity,[9] domestic chicken,[10] great tit[11] and Eurasian blue tit,[12] and fish: three-spined stickleback[13] and four species of the guppy genus Poecilia.
One observation about dietary conservatism is that each of the forager populations examined so far has included some individuals that are consistently conservative in diet.
[citation needed] Although dietary conservatism is a trait with a genetic basis,[5] its expression is, like any behaviour, a dynamic interaction between genes and the environment.