Related papers: Eating Smart: Free-ranging dogs follow an optimal …
Finding food is a fundamental activity for survival of all living organisms. Free-ranging dogs have been known to use their olfaction to assess the quality and type of available food but their use of visual ability in foraging is not…
Animals employ strategic decision-making while carefully weighing nutritional benefits against the risks presented by aversive or harmful stimuli in their natural environment, to maximize foraging efficiency, In India, free-ranging dogs…
Canids display a wide diversity of social systems, from solitary to pairs to packs, and hence they have been extensively used as model systems to understand social dynamics in natural systems. Among canids, the dog can show various levels…
Animals foraging alone are hypothesized to optimize the encounter rates with resources through L\'evy walks. However, the issue of how the interactions between multiple foragers influence their search efficiency is still not completely…
We introduce an idealized model of an intelligent forager in which higher intelligence corresponds to a larger spatial range over which the forager can detect food. Such a forager diffuses randomly whenever the nearest food is more distant…
Collective foragers, from animals to robotic swarms, must balance exploration and exploitation to locate sparse resources efficiently. While social learning is known to facilitate this balance, how the range of information sharing shapes…
Social foraging is a widespread form of animal foraging in which groups of individuals coordinate their decisions to exploit resources in the environment. Animals show a variety of social structures from egalitarian to hierarchical. In this…
Theory purports that animal foraging choices evolve to maximize returns, such as net energy intake. Empirical research in both human and nonhuman animals reveals that individuals often attend to the foraging choices of their competitors…
Interspecific communication plays a critical role in mediating human-animal interactions, particularly in contexts involving access to anthropogenic resources. This study investigates the influence of human gazing on the begging strategies…
Animals that display behavioural flexibility and adaptability thrive in urban environments, due to their ability to exploit novel anthropogenic resources. Since humans are an important component of such urban environments, animals that…
Free-ranging dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) constitute the majority of the global dog population and rely heavily on human-derived resources. Studies show different levels of responses to various cues like food, petting and gazing by humans.…
Animals typically forage in groups. Social foraging can help animals avoid predation and decrease their uncertainty about the richness of food resources. Despite this, theoretical mechanistic models of patch foraging have overwhelmingly…
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 widespread behavior, and being part of a group may bring several benefits compared to solitary foraging, such as collective pooling of information and reducing environmental uncertainty. Often theoretical models of collective…
Collective vigilance describes how animals in groups benefit from the predator detection efforts of others. Empirical observations typically find either a many-eyes strategy with all (or many) group members maintaining a low level of…
The foraging behavior of animals is a paradigm of target search in nature. Understanding which foraging strategies are optimal and how animals learn them are central challenges in modeling animal foraging. While the question of optimality…
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…
Collective animal movement fascinates children and scientists alike. One of the most commonly given explanations for collective animal movement is improved foraging. Animals are hypothesized to gain from searching for food in groups. Here,…
We introduce the \emph{frugal foraging} model in which a forager performs a discrete-time random walk on a lattice, where each site initially contains $\mathcal{S}$ food units. The forager metabolizes one unit of food at each step and…
Animals that scavenge in and around human localities need to utilize a broad range of resources. Preference for any one kind of food, under such circumstances, might be inefficient. Indian free-ranging dogs, Canis lupus familiaris are…