Related papers: Normative theory of patch foraging decisions

Primates utilize distributed neural circuits to learn habits in uncertain environments, but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. We propose a formal theory of network energetics explaining how brain states influence…

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…

Interactions among individuals in natural populations often occur in a dynamically changing environment. Understanding the role of environmental variation in population dynamics has long been a central topic in theoretical ecology and…

Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…

Living systems such as neuronal networks and animal groups process information about their environment via the dynamics of interacting units. These can transition between distinct macroscopic behaviors. Near such a transition (or critical…

Human societies around the world interact with each other by developing and maintaining social norms, and it is critically important to understand how such norms emerge and change. In this work, we define an evolutionary game-theoretic…

Existing theoretical models of evolution focus on the relative fitness advantages of different mutants in a population while the dynamic behavior of the population size is mostly left unconsidered. We here present a generic stochastic model…

We consider a continuous mathematical description of a population of ants and simulate numerically their foraging behavior using a system of partial differential equations of chemotaxis type. We show that this system accurately reproduces…

We analyze the movement of a starving forager on a one-dimensional periodic lattice, where each location contains one unit of food. As the forager lands on sites with food, it consumes the food, leaving the sites empty. If the forager lands…

Despite recent molecular technique improvements, biological knowledge remains incomplete. Reasoning on living systems hence implies to integrate heterogeneous and partial informations. Although current investigations successfully focus on…

Scale-free foraging patterns are widespread among animals. These may be the outcome of an optimal searching strategy to find scarce randomly distributed resources, but a less explored alternative is that this behaviour may result from the…

Numerical models indicate that collective animal behaviour may emerge from simple local rules of interaction among the individuals. However, very little is known about the nature of such interaction, so that models and theories mostly rely…

In this paper we introduce a method for determining local interaction rules in animal swarms. The method is based on the assumption that the behavior of individuals in a swarm can be treated as a set of mechanistic rules. The principal idea…

Functional responses are widely used to describe interactions and resources exchange between individuals in ecology. The form given to functional responses dramatically affects the dynamics and stability of populations and communities.…

It is well understood that Bayesian decision theory and average case analysis are essentially identical. However, if one is interested in performing uncertainty quantification for a numerical task, it can be argued that standard approaches…

The margins within the geographic range of species are often specific in terms of ecological and evolutionary processes, and can strongly influence the species' reaction to climate change. One of the frequently observed features at range…

Conflict destabilizes social interactions and impedes cooperation at multiple scales of biological organization. Of fundamental interest are the causes of turbulent periods of conflict. We analyze conflict dynamics in a monkey society model…

We study the performance of different methods for processing information, incorporating narrative selection within an evolutionary model. All agents update their beliefs according to Bayes' Rule, but some strategically choose the narrative…

Interpretation of animal behavior, especially as cooperative or selfish, is a challenge for evolutionary theory. Strategy of a competition should follow from corresponding Darwinian payoffs for the available behavioral options. The payoffs…

Many studies have shown that humans are "predictably irrational": they do not act in a fully rational way, but their deviations from rational behavior are quite systematic. Our goal is to see the extent to which we can explain and justify…