Related papers: How to Forage for a Mate?
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.…
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 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…
Current theories about mechanisms promoting species co-existence in diverse communities assume that species only interact ecologically. Species are treated as discrete evolutionary entities, even though abundant empirical evidence indicates…
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…
Maintaining genetic diversity as a means to avoid premature convergence is critical in Genetic Programming. Several approaches have been proposed to achieve this, with some focusing on the mating phase from coupling dissimilar solutions to…
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…
Mechanisms leading to speciation are a major focus in evolutionary biology. In this paper, we present and study a stochastic model of population where individuals, with type a or A, are equivalent from ecological, demographical and spatial…
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 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…
Bird migration is an adaptive behavior ultimately aiming at optimizing survival and reproductive success. We propose an optimal switching model to study bird migration, where birds' migration behaviors can be efficiently modeled as…
Much has been debated about the benefit of sexual over asexual reproduction in terms of evolutionary fitness. Here we focus on the advantage that may be brought about by the process of mating, where the choosing of mates contributes to the…
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…
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…
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…
Animal groups collaborate with one another throughout their lives to better comprehend their surroundings. Here, we try to model, using continuous random walks, how the entire process of birth, reproduction, and death might impact the…
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…
A prey animal surveying its environment must decide whether there is a dangerous predator present or not. If there is, it may flee. Flight has an associated cost, so the animal should not flee if there is no danger. However, the prey animal…
Patch foraging involves the deliberate and planned process of determining the optimal time to depart from a resource-rich region and investigate potentially more beneficial alternatives. The Marginal Value Theorem (MVT) is frequently used…
One of the most challenging issues of evolutionary biology concerns speciation, the emergence of new species from an initial one. The huge amount of species found in nature demands a simple and robust mechanism. Yet, no consensus has been…