The browser you are using is not supported by this website. All versions of Internet Explorer are no longer supported, either by us or Microsoft (read more here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-ie-support).

Please use a modern browser to fully experience our website, such as the newest versions of Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari etc.

Smart, smarter, smartest: foraging information states and coexistence

Author

Summary, in English

Animals possess different abilities to gain and use information about the foraging patches they exploit. When ignorant of the qualities of encountered patches, a smart forager Should leave all patches after the same amount of fixed search time. A smarter forager can be Bayesian by using information Oil Cumulative harvest and time spent searching a patch to better inform its patch-departure decision. The smartest forager has immediate and continuous knowledge about patch quality, and can make a perfect decision about when to leave each patch. Here we let each of these three strategies harvest resources from a slowly regenerating environment. Eventually a steady-state distribution of prey among patches arises where the environment-wide resource renewal just balances the environment-wide harvest of the foragers. The fixed time forager creates a distribution with the highest mean and highest variance of patch qualities, Followed by the Bayesian and the prescient in chat order. The less informed strategies promote distributions with both more resources and more exploitable information than the more informed strategies. While it is true chat a better-informed strategy will always out-perform a less well-informed, its Increase in performance may not compensate it for any costs associated with being better informed. We imagine that the fixed time strategy may be least expensive and the prescient strategy most expensive in terms of sensory organs and associated assess and respond capabilities. To consider competition between Such strategies with varying costs, we introduced a single individual of each of the strategies into the environments created by populations of the other strategies. There are threshold costs associated with the better-informed strategy such chat it can or cannot outcompete a less-informed strategy. However, over a relatively narrow range of foraging costs, less-informed and better-informed strategies will coexist. Furthermore, for the prescient and the Bayesian strategies, sonic combinations of foraging costs produce alternate stable states - whichever strategy establishes first remains safe from invasion by the other.

Publishing year

2010

Language

English

Pages

292-303

Publication/Series

Oikos

Volume

119

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Wiley-Blackwell

Topic

  • Ecology

Status

Published

Research group

  • Biodiversity and Conservation Science

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1600-0706