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Adaptive collective foraging in groups with conflicting nutritional needs.

Alistair M Senior1, Mathieu Lihoreau2, Michael A Charleston3

  • 1Charles Perkins Centre, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia; School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia.

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Summary

Collective foraging enhances nutrient balancing in animal groups with similar nutritional needs. However, groups with diverse needs, like males and females, may split to optimize foraging success.

Keywords:
collective decisionsforagingindividual-based modelnutritional geometrysocial interactionssociality

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Area of Science:

  • Behavioral Ecology
  • Evolutionary Biology
  • Nutritional Ecology

Background:

  • Collective foraging, driven by positive feedback and quorum responses, is generally considered to improve foraging efficiency.
  • Social information transfer aids foragers with aligned nutritional needs in finding nutrients and maintaining dietary balance.
  • The adaptiveness of collective foraging in heterogeneous groups with differing nutritional requirements remains largely unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how collective foraging, facilitated by social retention on food resources, can enhance nutrient balancing among individuals with diverse nutritional requirements.
  • To evaluate the impact of varying distributions of nutritional needs within a group on the evolution of collective foraging strategies.

Main Methods:

  • Development of an evolutionary agent-based model incorporating principles of nutritional ecology.
  • Simulation of foraging behavior in groups with unimodal and bimodal distributions of nutritional needs.
  • Analysis of individual fitness and group dynamics under different collective foraging scenarios.

Main Results:

  • In groups with unimodally distributed nutritional needs, high levels of collective foraging optimize individual fitness by minimizing search times between nutritionally imbalanced food sources.
  • In groups with highly bimodal nutritional needs (e.g., differing male and female requirements), collective foraging is selected against, potentially leading to group fission.
  • Assortative interactions can coevolve to enable collective foraging within subgroups possessing aligned nutritional requirements.

Conclusions:

  • Collective foraging is an effective strategy for nutrient regulation in animals facing complex nutritional landscapes and exhibiting varied social structures.
  • Group cohesion and foraging strategies are influenced by the distribution of individual nutritional requirements.
  • Understanding the interplay between nutritional needs and social foraging is crucial for explaining the diversity of animal social systems.