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Foraging

Foraging is the behavioral process by which organisms actively search for, locate, and acquire food resources from their environment, encompassing a wide range of strategies observed in both animals and humans to meet nutritional needs and ensure survival.^[1] In biological and ecological contexts, foraging involves hierarchical decisions at multiple scales, such as selecting habitats, exploiting resource patches, and choosing specific prey items, all of which influence an organism's energy balance and reproductive fitness.^[2] This behavior is fundamental to understanding trophic interactions, population dynamics, and evolutionary adaptations across species.^[3] Central to the study of animal foraging is optimal foraging theory (OFT), a framework developed in evolutionary ecology that predicts foragers will adopt strategies maximizing net energy intake per unit time while accounting for handling costs, search times, and predation risks.^[4] Originating from adaptationist principles in the mid-20th century, OFT has been tested across diverse taxa, from solitary predators like hummingbirds selecting flower patches to group foragers such as flocks of birds or herds of herbivores coordinating movements through social cues and game-theoretic decisions.^[5] Empirical evidence supports OFT's predictions qualitatively in many cases, though variations arise due to environmental complexity, learning, and non-energy factors like nutrient requirements.^[2] Foraging types include ambush predation, active hunting, and grazing, each tailored to ecological niches and resource availability.^[1] In human contexts, foraging—often termed hunting and gathering—represents the earliest and most widespread subsistence strategy, relying exclusively on wild plants, animals, and fish without domestication or agriculture, and it persisted as the dominant mode for over 95% of human history until approximately 12,000 years ago.^[6] Anthropological studies highlight its egalitarian social structures, broad-spectrum diets incorporating diverse resources like nuts, insects, and game, and nomadic mobility to follow seasonal abundances, as exemplified by groups such as the !Kung San in the Kalahari Desert or the Aché in Paraguay's rainforests.^[7] Women typically contributed the majority of caloric intake through gathering, while men focused on hunting larger prey, fostering gender-specific knowledge transmission.^[7] Today, foraging persists among indigenous forager societies facing marginalization, and OFT models have been adapted to analyze prehistoric human adaptations and even modern behaviors in resource-scarce or urban settings.^[8]

Definitions and Basic Concepts

Definition of Foraging

Foraging, derived from the Old French word forage meaning "fodder" or "provision," traces its roots to the Frankish fōdrōn (to feed) and entered English in the 14th century as a term for searching or plundering for supplies, particularly for animals.^[9] In ecological contexts, the concept evolved during the 1960s through foundational studies on resource use and behavioral adaptation, such as MacArthur and Pianka's 1966 model of optimal habitat selection, which integrated foraging as a key process in patchy environments. Foraging refers to the behavioral process by which animals search for, detect, pursue, and exploit food resources in natural environments, encompassing a sequence of actions from initial detection to resource acquisition.^[1] This process includes pre-ingestion activities such as habitat selection, patch choice, and decision-making on whether to pursue potential prey or resources, distinguishing it from mere feeding, which focuses primarily on ingestion and consumption.^[10] Unlike hunting, which often implies active pursuit of mobile prey, or grazing, which involves continuous cropping of vegetation, foraging broadly covers both active and passive strategies for diverse resource types, including handling time post-detection like processing or transport.^[11] The scope of foraging extends across taxa, from invertebrates to vertebrates, adapting to varied ecological niches; for instance, honeybees (Apis mellifera) exhibit flower-constant foraging to collect nectar and pollen, optimizing energy gain through visual cues and dance communication within a colony.^[12] Similarly, gray wolves (Canis lupus) demonstrate pack-based foraging for large ungulates, balancing search costs with high-yield pursuits in seasonal environments.^[13] This universality underscores foraging as a fundamental survival mechanism, applicable to aquatic species like fish navigating currents for plankton and terrestrial mammals exploiting ephemeral food patches.^[10]

Ecological and Evolutionary Importance

Foraging plays a central role in ecological systems by facilitating energy transfer through food webs, where consumer behaviors determine the flow of resources from primary producers to higher trophic levels. In these networks, foraging decisions influence the structure and complexity of interactions, with optimal strategies predicting connectance levels between 0.01 and 0.4 based on encounter rates and handling times of prey.^[14] This process underpins nutrient cycling and ecosystem productivity, as herbivores and predators selectively exploit resources, shaping the efficiency of energy propagation across trophic levels.^[15] Foraging also affects biodiversity by intensifying resource competition, which expands diet breadth within populations as preferred prey become scarcer, promoting coexistence among species.^[16] In diverse communities, this competition fosters niche partitioning, reducing overlap and stabilizing species richness. Additionally, foraging behaviors dictate habitat use, with animals settling in resource-rich patches and adjusting movement rates—such as herbivores doubling speed in low-quality areas like unburnt grasslands during scarcity—to optimize access to food.^[11] Evolutionarily, foraging efficiency acts as a primary selective pressure, driving adaptations that enhance survival and resource acquisition. In Darwin's finches, beak morphology has diversified through natural selection to match local food sources, with deeper beaks evolving in populations facing larger, harder seeds during droughts, improving cracking efficiency.^[17] Similarly, venom in predators like snakes and spiders has evolved primarily for prey immobilization, enabling rapid subduing of elusive or armored targets and expanding dietary range without excessive energy expenditure on pursuit.^[18] Foraging success directly impacts individual fitness, linking net energy intake to survival and reproduction. Studies on Antarctic fur seals demonstrate that females with higher foraging efficiencies—measured as energy gained per unit time—produce heavier pups at weaning, correlating with greater maternal body condition and offspring viability.^[19] This net energy balance, often quantified as calories acquired minus search and handling costs, determines reproductive output, with efficient foragers allocating more resources to breeding.^[20] At the community level, foraging mediates trophic cascades, where keystone predators alter prey behaviors and abundances, cascading effects through ecosystems. In Yellowstone, reintroduced gray wolves reduce elk foraging in high-risk riparian zones, decreasing browsing on aspen and willow, which boosts vegetation recovery and supports diverse understory species.^[21] Likewise, sea otter recovery in Alaskan kelp forests suppresses sea urchin grazing, preventing barren formations and preserving macroalgal habitats that sustain fish and invertebrate biodiversity.^[22]

Theoretical Foundations

Optimal Foraging Theory

Optimal foraging theory (OFT) posits that animals evolve foraging behaviors that maximize their net energy intake over time, defined as the energy gained from food minus the energetic costs of searching, pursuing, and handling prey.^[23] This framework assumes that foragers possess perfect knowledge of prey profitability, encounter rates, and environmental conditions, and behave rationally to optimize long-term energy acquisition rates, which ultimately enhances fitness.^[24] Seminal contributions by MacArthur and Pianka (1966) and Emlen (1966) established these principles through graphical and mathematical models depicting optimal diet selection in patchy habitats.^[25]^[26] Central to OFT are the prey model and the patch model. In the prey model, foragers encounter prey types sequentially and decide whether to attack based on profitability, calculated as the energy gained e_i divided by handling time h_i for prey type i. Prey are included in the diet if their profitability exceeds the overall foraging rate R, following the zero-one rule where high-profitability prey are always pursued and lower ones ignored, yielding the optimal rate equation:

R = \frac{\sum p_i \lambda_i e_i}{1 + \sum p_i \lambda_i h_i}

where p_i is the probability of attack (0 or 1), and \lambda_i is the encounter rate.^[23] The patch model, extended by the Marginal Value Theorem (MVT), addresses time allocation within resource patches where intake declines over time due to depletion. Foragers should leave a patch when the instantaneous gain rate equals the average foraging rate in the environment E_n^*, formalized as:

\frac{dg_i(T_i)}{dT_i} = E_n^*

where g_i(T_i) is net gain after time T_i in patch i, accounting for search costs.^[27] These models predict that optimal strategies balance search and exploitation to maximize efficiency.^[28] OFT predicts that diet breadth expands under conditions of prey scarcity or high hunger, as foragers include lower-profitability items to maintain energy intake, while abundant high-quality prey lead to narrower diets.^[23] Empirical support emerged in the 1970s from studies on birds and fish; for instance, great tits (Parus major) selectively attacked profitable prey as predicted by the zero-one rule in laboratory trials.^[23] Similarly, shore crabs (Carcinus maenas) adjusted diet breadth in response to mussel availability, aligning with profitability rankings.^[24] These findings validated core predictions across taxa, though assumptions like perfect knowledge were often approximated in controlled settings.^[29] Criticisms of OFT highlight deviations from predictions due to incomplete information, such as uncertain prey recognition or fluctuating encounter rates, leading foragers to use heuristics rather than optimal calculations.^[23] Refinements incorporate Bayesian updating for learning about prey types during foraging.^[23] Extensions to risk-sensitive foraging address variance in returns; in low-resource environments, foragers may maximize energy variance (risk-prone) to avoid starvation when below metabolic needs, as modeled by the z-score Z = (R - \mu)/\sigma, where R is the energy requirement, \mu the mean gain, and \sigma the standard deviation.^[23] This adjustment, supported by experiments on dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis), refines OFT for unpredictable conditions.^[23]

Ideal Free Distribution and Interference Competition Models

The Ideal Free Distribution (IFD) is a foundational model in foraging ecology that predicts how freely moving foragers should distribute themselves across resource patches to achieve equal average fitness or per capita resource intake across all occupied habitats. Proposed by Fretwell and Lucas in 1970, the theory assumes perfect knowledge of patch profitability, no travel costs between patches, and scramble competition where resource intake declines with increasing forager density due to resource depletion. Under these conditions, foragers aggregate in richer patches until densities equalize intake rates, resulting in density-dependent habitat use where the proportion of foragers in a patch matches the proportion of resources available there. The IFD has been extended to scenarios involving defended or clumped resources, where interference competition dominates over simple depletion. In this framework, discrete sites of concentrated resources attract groups, leading to contests over access rather than passive sharing. Key to the model is the role of dominance hierarchies, where higher-ranked individuals gain disproportionate access to resources within the site, while subordinates face reduced intake due to aggressive interactions or exclusion. This extension, known as the phenotype-limited ideal free distribution, was developed by Sutherland and Parker in 1986 and accounts for the costs of contests, such as time and energy lost to aggression, which alter distribution patterns from the basic IFD.^[30] Empirical tests of the IFD have supported its predictions in various systems, though deviations often arise from unmodeled factors like travel costs or aggression. For instance, studies on birds at experimental feeders, such as great tits (Parus major), have shown distributions closely matching resource inputs, with more birds in high-profitability sites until per capita rates equalize. Similarly, in fish schools, like three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus), foragers distribute proportionally to prey density across patches, achieving intake matching. However, when interference is prominent, as in defended sites, distributions deviate; for example, dominant individuals monopolize central positions in bird flocks or fish shoals, reducing subordinate fitness and leading to under-matching in poorer competitors. Travel costs can cause underexploitation of distant patches, while heightened aggression in clumped resources promotes hierarchical segregation within sites. Mathematically, the IFD reaches equilibrium when the per capita intake rate in each patch equals the global average, expressed as n_i / n = R_i / R, where n_i is the number of foragers in patch i, n is the total number of foragers, and R_i and R are the resource input rates in patch i and overall, respectively. This input-matching rule ensures no net movement between patches. In contrast, the interference model incorporates contest costs, modifying intake as I_i = R_i \cdot f(n_i, h) - c, where f represents the density- and hierarchy-dependent sharing function (often a power law reflecting interference), h denotes dominance rank, and c is the cost of aggressive interactions, leading to unequal fitness outcomes within sites despite overall stability. These models highlight how competition structures spatial foraging patterns, linking to broader group dynamics without delving into solitary strategies.^[30]

Factors Influencing Foraging Behavior

Intrinsic Biological Factors

Intrinsic biological factors play a crucial role in shaping foraging behavior through internal mechanisms such as learning, genetics, and physiological states that are inherent to the organism. These drivers enable animals to adapt their search and consumption strategies based on individual capabilities and conditions, optimizing energy acquisition while balancing internal trade-offs. Learning mechanisms, including associative and observational forms, allow animals to refine foraging efficiency. Associative learning, often through trial-and-error, enables wild animals to link environmental cues with food rewards, enhancing prey selection and overall adaptive value in natural settings.^[31] For instance, predatory mites (Neoseiulus californicus) employ associative learning to improve host location during foraging, distinguishing it from non-associative processes like habituation.^[32] In social species, observational learning facilitates the acquisition of novel foraging techniques by watching conspecifics, as seen in goats (Capra hircus) that solve foraging problems more readily after observing skilled individuals.^[33] Neural underpinnings, such as habituation, reduce responses to repeated non-threatening stimuli, aiding focus on relevant foraging cues; in Drosophila melanogaster, olfactory habituation mutations disrupt this process, altering odor-based food search.^[34] Genetic factors contribute heritable variation in foraging traits, influencing search strategies and behavioral tendencies. In fruit flies like Drosophila lutescens, genetic polymorphisms underlie differences in foraging path lengths and efficiency, with quantitative trait loci (QTLs) accounting for significant portions of this variation.^[35] Evolutionary trade-offs, such as those involving boldness, shape these traits; bolder individuals in bird populations exhibit greater exploration during foraging but face higher risks, positioning them along a spectrum of search versus exploitation behaviors.^[36] In birds, genetic polymorphisms like those in the DRD4 gene are linked to personality variations that affect innovative foraging, including propensities for tool use in species such as corvids.^[37] Physiological states further modulate foraging by altering motivation and risk assessment. Hunger intensifies risk-taking, as hungry house sparrows (Passer domesticus) increase scrounging in social groups to access food, elevating exposure to predation risks while prioritizing energy intake.^[38] Hormones like leptin regulate appetite suppression, signaling energy sufficiency to the brain and thereby reducing foraging drive in well-fed animals across vertebrate species.^[39] Age and sex differences also manifest, with males often adopting distinct foraging patterns to meet mating-related energy demands; in spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi), bioenergetic models reveal sex-specific prey capture rates and trip durations tied to reproductive costs.^[40]

Extrinsic Environmental Factors

Extrinsic environmental factors play a pivotal role in shaping foraging behavior by imposing constraints on resource access and survival risks. The presence of predators, for instance, forces animals to balance the need for food intake against the threat of predation, often leading to reduced foraging efficiency in high-risk environments. According to the risk allocation hypothesis, prey species adjust their foraging intensity based on temporal fluctuations in predation risk, decreasing activity during periods of elevated danger to minimize encounters with predators.^[41] This adaptive response results in lower overall foraging rates, as animals allocate more time to vigilance rather than feeding. Vigilance trade-offs further exacerbate this effect, where increased scanning for threats directly reduces the time available for foraging and thus lowers intake rates, as observed in various avian and mammalian species.^[42] Parasitism introduces additional extrinsic pressures by altering host physiology and behavior in ways that impact foraging decisions. Certain parasites, such as Toxoplasma gondii, manipulate host behavior to enhance transmission, often by increasing risk-taking tendencies during foraging, which exposes infected individuals to predators more frequently.^[43] Beyond behavioral changes, parasitism imposes energetic costs that diminish foraging capacity; for example, infected birds exhibit higher metabolic demands during flight and reduced time spent foraging due to elevated energy expenditure associated with immune responses.^[44] These costs can lead to suboptimal foraging strategies, where hosts prioritize energy conservation over efficient resource acquisition. Resource distribution and habitat characteristics profoundly influence foraging patterns through spatial and temporal variability. Patchy resource environments compel foragers to invest more time in searching between depleted and abundant patches, increasing travel costs and overall energy expenditure, as demonstrated in models of wading bird foraging on intertidal landscapes.^[45] Temporal fluctuations, such as tidal cycles, further constrain access; shorebirds, for instance, synchronize their foraging to low-tide periods when intertidal prey is exposed, but high tides limit available habitat and force concentrated activity in shrinking areas.^[46] For example, a 2024 study highlights how climate warming can enhance foraging flexibility in some species by extending activity windows, yet disrupt prey distributions, leading to reduced coexistence among predators and altered community structures.^[47] For example, 2024 research on Arctic ecosystems shows that ocean warming shifts prey availability, compelling marine mammals to adapt foraging routes amid unpredictable distributions.^[48] Human-induced habitat fragmentation adds another layer of extrinsic disruption by breaking continuous landscapes into isolated patches, which alters foraging routes and increases movement risks for many species. In fragmented forests, animals like squirrels and birds must navigate longer distances between suitable foraging sites, elevating energy costs and exposure to mortality factors such as roads.^[49] This reconfiguration of habitat connectivity often results in restricted access to diverse resources, forcing foragers to rely on lower-quality patches and potentially reducing population fitness.^[50]

Foraging Strategies

Solitary Foraging

Solitary foraging involves individuals searching for and exploiting food resources independently, without coordination or interference from conspecifics. This strategy is prevalent among many species, including insects, birds, and mammals, where animals navigate heterogeneous environments to locate prey or nutrients. Adaptations in movement patterns and sensory mechanisms enable efficient resource detection and acquisition in the absence of social cues. Search behaviors in solitary foragers often contrast random walks, which are suitable for evenly distributed resources, with Lévy flights—characterized by occasional long-distance movements interspersed with shorter steps—that optimize searches in sparse, patchy environments. For instance, some sharks exhibit Lévy-like movement patterns during foraging bouts, allowing them to cover large areas efficiently when prey is unpredictably distributed. These patterns align with the Lévy flight foraging hypothesis, which predicts such strategies enhance encounter rates with rare targets by balancing exploration and exploitation. In addition to movement, solitary foragers rely on specialized detection mechanisms; echolocating bats, such as hoary bats (Lasiurus cinereus), emit inconspicuous ultrasonic pulses to locate insects in cluttered habitats, adjusting call intensity to minimize self-deafening while maximizing prey detection. Tool use represents a key adaptation in some solitary foragers, enabling access to otherwise unreachable resources and requiring advanced cognitive skills like planning and causal understanding. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in central Africa fashion modified sticks to extract termites from mounds, selecting straight, flexible branches and stripping leaves to create probes, a behavior that demands sequential problem-solving and has been observed in both wild and captive individuals without prior demonstration. Similarly, New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) craft hooked tools from twigs or pandanus leaves to retrieve insect larvae from crevices, evaluating multiple functional properties such as hook orientation and material stiffness, which necessitates metatool understanding and innovation beyond simple imitation. These cognitive requirements, including analogical reasoning and foresight, underscore the evolutionary sophistication of tool-based solitary foraging in corvids. Optimal foraging theory (OFT) applies to solitary decisions by predicting when individuals should leave resource patches to maximize net energy intake. In solitary bees, foragers assess patch profitability through declining rewards and use a combination of time-based and count-based rules to depart flowers, integrating scent marks to avoid depleted sites and thus optimizing travel efficiency. Central place foraging, an extension relevant to nest-returning solitary animals, focuses on load size optimization to balance collection time against increased travel costs; for example, red wood ants (Formica aquilonia) adjust carried loads to 20-50% of body mass based on distance, with heavier loads for nearer nests to minimize round-trip energy expenditure.^[51] One primary advantage of solitary foraging is reduced competition, allowing individuals to monopolize patches without depletion by others, which is particularly beneficial in low-density populations. Additionally, this strategy provides flexibility in heterogeneous environments, where foragers can adapt movement and decisions to local resource variability; recent studies on Drosophila larval strains demonstrate that active solitary searching in patchy food distributions enhances survival and adaptation rates compared to passive strategies, supporting local optimization in polymorphic populations.

Group Foraging

Group foraging involves animals searching for and exploiting food resources collectively, often leading to emergent behaviors that enhance overall efficiency but introduce social trade-offs. In this strategy, individuals coordinate or tolerate proximity to others during foraging, which can amplify benefits through shared vigilance and resource location while incurring costs from competition. Studies on various taxa demonstrate that group size influences these dynamics, with optimal group sizes balancing predation avoidance against intra-group conflicts.^[52] Key benefits of group foraging include the dilution of predation risk, where the probability of any single individual being targeted decreases as group size increases, allowing more time for feeding. For instance, larger groups enable collective vigilance, reducing the need for individual scanning and thereby boosting net energy intake. Additionally, public information use, such as eavesdropping on the foraging success of others, facilitates faster patch discovery; experimental evidence from echolocating bats shows that individuals adjust their hunting based on acoustic cues from conspecifics, improving capture rates in insect swarms. However, costs arise from kleptoparasitism, where group members steal food from one another, reducing the forager's return and increasing handling time, as observed in fork-tailed drongos interacting with other birds. Interference competition further elevates costs, particularly when food is clumped, leading to aggressive displacements that lower intake rates for subordinates in species like pigeons.^[53]^[54]^[55]^[56]^[57] Information sharing in groups extends beyond direct communication to passive cues, promoting efficient resource use in patchy environments. For example, in mixed-species bird flocks, followers eavesdrop on the alarm calls and foraging probes of leader species, gaining indirect knowledge of predator-free zones and prey locations, which enhances their detection rates without independent search costs. Collective decision-making further refines these dynamics, as seen in fish shoals where quorum responses—nonlinear thresholds triggered by joining individuals—facilitate consensus on migration direction toward richer foraging areas, ensuring accurate information transfer even amid conflicting signals. In social insects like ants, similar quorum sensing during raids allows colonies to amplify recruitment signals, committing to high-value food sources only when sufficient scouts confirm viability, thus minimizing wasted effort.^[58]^[59]^[60]^[61] Applications of foraging theory to groups highlight how social structure shapes patch exploitation. The ideal free distribution (IFD) predicts that in non-aggressive groups, foragers distribute across depleting patches to equalize intake rates; field tests with common cranes at varying-quality feeding zones confirm this, as flock sizes adjust proportionally to resource profitability, maintaining equilibrium intake. In aggressive species like lions, foraging arena theory accounts for temporal and spatial partitioning of prey vulnerability, where prides defend arenas to monopolize access, with group hunts succeeding more on large prey due to coordinated encirclement, though success plateaus beyond optimal sizes of 1 female or 5-6 females during scarcity.^[62] Recent advances (2020-2025) integrate these with uncertainty modeling, showing that in volatile environments, groups adopt hybrid strategies—blending producer-scrounger roles—to hedge risks, as tracking data from migratory birds reveal adaptive quorum adjustments that stabilize decisions under fluctuating prey availability.^[52] Illustrative examples underscore these principles. In mixed-species flocks of neotropical birds, nuclear species like tanagers initiate movements, drawing satellite species that benefit from diluted risk and shared insect flushes, with foraging rates increasing inside flocks compared to solo efforts.^[58] Wolf packs exemplify mammalian group foraging, where larger groups (9-13 members) improve bison hunt success through role differentiation—pursuers and ambushes—but incur higher food-sharing costs offset by reduced scavenging losses to ravens, favoring pack stability in prey-scarce winters.^[63] Evolutionary stability of group foraging persists when benefits like enhanced survival from collective defense outweigh costs, as game-theoretic models show stable vigilance levels in groups where individuals trade solo foraging gains for diluted predation, promoting gregariousness in open habitats.^[64]^[65]

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Jul 17, 2022 · Due to the potentially high costs of moving between patches, fragmented habitats are predicted to complicate foraging decisions of many animals.Missing: altering | Show results with:altering
[50]
Coupling movement and landscape ecology for animal conservation ...
Jan 3, 2018 · Habitat conversion in production landscapes is among the greatest threats to biodiversity, not least because it can disrupt animal movement.
[51]
The Physics of Sensing and Decision-Making by Animal Groups
May 6, 2025 · This review highlights key examples of temporal and spatiotemporal dynamics in animal group decision-making, emphasizing strong connections ...
[52]
Costs and benefits of group living are neither simple nor linear - PMC
The increased energetic costs of living in a large group may be a sensible investment, if larger groups experience decreased predation or increased success in ...
[53]
Causal evidence for the adaptive benefits of social foraging in the wild
Jan 20, 2021 · Our study provides rare causal evidence for the adaptive benefits of social foraging in the wild, and highlights that sex differences in sociality do not ...
[54]
Experimental evidence for group hunting via eavesdropping in ... - NIH
Group foraging has been suggested as an important factor for the evolution of sociality. However, visual cues are predominantly used to gain information ...
[55]
pay‐offs from self‐foraging versus kleptoparasitism - Flower - 2013
Sep 3, 2012 · ... kleptoparasitism is a risky foraging tactic and may incur additional foraging costs compared with self-foraging. This is the first study to ...
[56]
Nonlinear effects of food aggregation on interference competition in ...
Jun 30, 2010 · Previous studies of interference competition have shown an asymmetric effect on intake rate of foragers on clumped resources, ...
[57]
Benefits of foraging in mixed‐species flocks depend on species role ...
Nov 16, 2022 · Our study indicates that benefits gained from foraging in mixed flocks depend on a complex combination of species roles, species-specific traits, and ...
[58]
Quorum Decision-Making in Foraging Fish Shoals | PLOS One
Mar 7, 2012 · Quorum responses provide a means for group-living animals to integrate and filter disparate social information to produce accurate and ...
[59]
Quorum decision-making facilitates information transfer in fish shoals
This study shows that effective and accurate information transfer in groups may be gained only through nonlinear responses of group members to each other.
[60]
Speed versus accuracy in collective decision making - Journals
Here we show that these ants can lower their quorum thresholds between benign and harsh conditions to adjust their speed–accuracy trade–off. Indeed, in harsh ...<|separator|>
[61]
A Field Test of Ideal Free Distribution in Flock-Feeding Common ...
3. The average daily food intake of a crane was thus positively correlated with both the quality of the foraging zone and the dominance rank of the bird.
[62]
Why Lions Form Groups: Food is Not Enough
Extensive observations of foraging female lions reveal that two group sizes maximize foraging success during the season of prey scarcity: one female and ...
[63]
Influence of Group Size on the Success of Wolves Hunting Bison
Nov 12, 2014 · An intriguing aspect of social foraging behaviour is that large groups are often no better at capturing prey than are small groups, ...
[64]
Raven scavenging favours group foraging in wolves - ScienceDirect
Studies show that individual wolves that live in large packs suffer reduced foraging returns. Therefore, group hunting and group living (sociality) in wolves is ...
[65]
Evolutionarily stable levels of vigilance as a function of group size
In this paper a general ESS model of vigilance as a function of group size is developed. The model is based on an explicit foraging process.