Related papers: Optimally Frugal Foraging
We analyze the properties of model food webs and of fifteen community food webs from a variety of environments. We first perform a theoretical analysis of the niche model of Williams and Martinez. We derive analytical expressions for the…
Motile organisms often use finite spatial perception of their surroundings to navigate and search their habitats. Yet standard models of search are usually based on purely local sensory information. To model how a finite perceptual horizon…
Ecosystems frequently display the coexistence of diverse species under resource competition, typically resulting in skewed distributions of rarity and abundance. A potential driver of such coexistence is environmental fluctuations that…
The Allee effect is an important phenomenon in population biology characterized by positive density dependence, that is a positive correlation between population density and individual fitness. However, the effect is not well studied in…
We develop a model of the behaviour of a dynamically optimizing economic agent who makes consumption-saving and spatial relocation decisions. We formulate an existence result for the model, derive the necessary conditions for optimality and…
We study the search kinetics of an immobile target by a concentration of randomly moving searchers. The object of the study is to optimize the probability of detection within the constraints of our model. The target is hidden on a…
Living in groups brings benefits to many animals, such as a protection against predators and an improved capacity for sensing and making decisions while searching for resources in uncertain environments. A body of studies has shown how…
Ergodicity describes an equivalence between the expectation value and the time average of observables. Applied to human behaviour, ergodic theories of decision-making reveal how individuals should tolerate risk in different environments. To…
How do we capture the breadth of behavior in animal movement, from rapid body twitches to aging? Using high-resolution videos of the nematode worm $C. elegans$, we show that a single dynamics connects posture-scale fluctuations with…
Demographic data and recent experiments verify earlier predictions that mortality has short (few percent of the life span) memory of the previous life history, may be significantly decreased, reset to its value at a much younger age, and…
The frog model is an interacting particle system on a graph. Active particles perform independent simple random walks, while sleeping particles remain inert until visited by an active particle. Some number of sleeping particles are placed…
How to best exploit patchy resources? This long-standing question belongs to the extensively studied class of explore/exploit problems that arise in a wide range of situations, from animal foraging, to robotic exploration, and to human…
We study a system of random walks, known as the frog model, starting from a profile of independent Poisson($\lambda$) particles per site, with one additional active particle planted at some vertex $\mathbf{o}$ of a finite connected simple…
We explore the application of a new theory of Semantic Information to the well-motivated problem of a resource foraging agent. Semantic information is defined as the subset of correlations, measured via the transfer entropy, between agent…
We introduce range-controlled random walks with hopping rates depending on the range $\mathcal{N}$, that is, the total number of previously distinct visited sites. We analyze a one-parameter class of models with a hopping rate…
The model organism Physarum polycephalum is known to perform decentralised problem solving despite absence of nervous system. Experimental evidence and modelling studies have linked these abilities, and in particular maze-solving, to some…
We study the optimal sustainable harvesting of a population that lives in a random environment. The novelty of our setting is that we maximize the asymptotic harvesting yield, both in an expected value and almost sure sense, for a large…
The considered model will be formulated as related to "the fishing problem" even if the other applications of it are much more obvious. The angler goes fishing. He uses various techniques and he has at most two fishing rods. He buys a…
We consider a stochastic individual based model where each predator searches during a random time and then manipulates its prey or rests. The time distributions may be non-exponential. An age structure allows to describe these interactions…
This paper investigates a partial-information pursuit evasion game in which the Pursuer has a limited-range sensor to detect the Evader. Given a fixed final time, we derive the optimal evasion strategy for the Evader to maximize its…