English

Forager with intermittent rest: Better for survival?

Statistical Mechanics 2026-04-02 v2 Biological Physics Physics and Society

Abstract

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 SS steps without food. We introduce the concept of intermittent rest in the dynamics which allows the forager to rest with probability pp upon consumption of food. The parameter pp significantly affects the lifetime of the forager, showing that the intermittent rest can be beneficial for the forager for chosen parameter values. The study of various other quantities reveals interesting scaling behavior with pp and also departure from usual diffusive behavior for 0.5<p<10.5 < p < 1. In addition to numerical simulations, the problem has been studied with analytical approach in one dimension and the results up to p<0.5p < 0.5 agree with the numerical ones to a large extent.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.22262,
  title  = {Forager with intermittent rest: Better for survival?},
  author = {Md Aquib Molla and Sanchari Goswami and Parongama Sen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.22262},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

12 pages, 11 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:46:09.764Z