A fundamental requirement for all organisms is to determine how to adapt to changes in their environment or internal needs.  Dopamine has long been linked with regulating adaptive decisions through its implication in reinforcement learning, yet there is still little consensus as to how these signals guide adaptive decisions.  One potential reason for this is that, while laboratory studies have commonly focused on situations where animals are required to learn and compare the values of simultaneously presented options, as happens during reversal learning or ‘bandit’ tasks, in more naturalistic foraging settings, potential sources of reward are more often encountered sequentially.  A key computation is then how long to persist in working for reward in the current location and when to switch to an alternative based on estimates of the expected future reward rate in the current location against the average reward rate in the broader environment.  Importantly, increasing evidence suggests dopamine represents reward information over different timescales, making it potentially ideally placed to regulate such foraging decisions.  I’ll describe how our ongoing work, combining techniques to monitor and manipulate dopamine over prolonged periods in freely-behaving animals performing foraging tasks, is helping us unravel how dopamine signalling at different timescales helps promote efficient adaptive foraging.