Related papers: Social hierarchy shapes foraging decisions
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…
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…
Foraging is a fundamental behavior as animals' search for food is crucial for their survival. Patch leaving is a canonical foraging behavior, but classic theoretical conceptions of patch leaving decisions lack some key naturalistic details.…
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…
A canonical foraging task is the patch-leaving problem, in which a forager must decide to leave a current resource in search for another. Theoretical work has derived optimal strategies for when to leave a patch, and experiments have tested…
Social hierarchy is important that can not be ignored in human socioeconomic activities and in the animal world. Here we incorporate this factor into the evolutionary game to see what impact it could have on the cooperation outcome. The…
Collective motion of bird flocks can be explained via the hypothesis of many wrongs, and/or, a structured leadership mechanism. In pigeons, previous studies have shown that there is a well-defined hierarchical structure and certain specific…
Moving groups are routinely faced with a choice of different routes as part of their daily lives, such as choosing between exits from a building. Differences in moving speeds and environmental constraints often lead to individuals being…
How do social animals make effective decisions in the absence of a leader? While coordination can improve accuracy, it also introduces delays as information propagates through the group. In changing environments, these delays can outweigh…
Gregarious animals need to make collective decisions in order to keep their cohesiveness. Several species of them live in multilevel societies, and form herds composed of smaller communities. We present a model for the development of a…
Many social and biological systems are characterized by enduring hierarchies, including those organized around prestige in academia, dominance in animal groups, and desirability in online dating. Despite their ubiquity, the general…
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…
Precisely how ecological factors influence animal social structure is far from clear. We explore this question using an agent-based model inspired by the fission-fusion society of Spider monkeys (Ateles spp). Our model introduces a…
Members of a social species need to make appropriate decisions about who, how, and when to interact with others in their group. However, it has been difficult for researchers to detect the inputs to these decisions and, in particular, how…
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…
Animals living in groups make movement decisions that depend, among other factors, on social interactions with other group members. Our present understanding of social rules in animal collectives is mainly based on empirical fits to…
Herbivorous wild species constantly strive to optimize the trade-off between energy and nutrient intake and predation risk during foraging. This has led to the selection of several evolutionary traits -- such as diet, habitat selection, and…
Foraging is a central decision-making behavior performed by all animals, essential to garnishing enough energy for an organism to survive. Similarly, mating is crucial for evolutionary continuity and offspring production. Mate choice is one…
Swarm dynamics is the study of collections of agents that interact with one another without central control. In natural systems, insects, birds, fish and other large mammals function in larger units to increase the overall fitness of the…
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,…