Related papers: Caching in or falling back at the Sevilleta

Consumers face numerous risks that can be minimized by incorporating different life-history strategies. How much and when a consumer adds to its energetic reserves or invests in reproduction are key behavioral and physiological adaptations…

We study a simple model of a foraging animal that modifies the substrate on which it moves. This substrate provides its only resource, and the forager manage it by taking a limited portion at each visited site. The resource recovers its…

In group foraging situations, the conventional expectation is that increased food availability would enhance consumption, especially when animals prioritize maximizing their food intake. This paper challenges this conventional wisdom by…

Foraging is a crucial activity, yet the extent to which humans employ flexible versus rigid strategies remains unclear. This study investigates how individuals adapt their foraging strategies in response to resource distribution and…

We study the fate of a forager who searches for food performing a random walk on lattices. The forager consumes the available food on the site it visits and leaves it depleted but can survive up to $S$ steps without food. We introduce the…

Dormancy is a widespread adaptive strategy that enables populations to persist in fluctuating environments, yet how its benefits depend on the temporal structure of environmental variability remains unclear. We examine how dormancy…

Understanding how animals make foraging decisions in challenging or unpleasant contexts sheds light on the processes that underlie cognitive development and the evolution of adaptive foraging techniques in complex ecological settings. In…

We analyze the harvesting and stocking of a population that is affected by random and seasonal environmental fluctuations. The main novelty comes from having three layers of environmental fluctuations. The first layer is due to the…

In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…

In this work, we consider partial consumption of food by a forager in presence of a threshold energy level. The forager considered here can survive for $S$ steps without food, namely the survival time. The threshold limits the consumption…

In varying environments it is beneficial for organisms to utilize available cues to infer the conditions they may encounter and express potentially favorable traits. However, external cues can be unreliable or too costly to use. We consider…

Thanks to recent technological advances, it is now possible to track with an unprecedented precision and for long periods of time the movement patterns of many living organisms in their habitat. The increasing amount of data available on…

Previous human foraging experiments have shown that human groups routinely undermatch environmental resources much like other animal species. In this experiment, we test whether humans also selectively rely on others as information sources…

Resource competition is a fundamental interaction in natural communities.However little is known about competition in spatial environments where organisms are able to regulate resource distributions. Here, we analyze the competition of two…

We study a simple model of a forager as a walk that modifies a relaxing substrate. Within it simplicity, this provides an insight on a number of relevant and non-intuitive facts. Even without memory of the good places to feed and no…

Response time-delay is an ubiquitous phenomenon in biological systems. Here we use a simple stochastic population model with time-delayed switching-rate conversion to quantitatively study the biological influence of the response time-delay…

Information foraging connects optimal foraging theory in ecology with how humans search for information. The theory suggests that, following an information scent, the information seeker must optimize the tradeoff between exploration by…

Due to stochastic fluctuations arising from finite population size, known as genetic drift, the ability of a population to explore a rugged fitness landscape depends on its size. In the weak mutation regime, while the mean steady-state…

Foraging and acquiring of food is a delicate balance between managing the costs, both energy and social, and individual preferences. Previous research on the solitary foraging of free ranging dogs showed that they prioritized the…

Foraging site constancy, or repeated return to the same foraging location, is a foraging strategy used by many species to decrease uncertainty, but it is often unclear exactly how the foraging site is identified. Here we focus on the…