Developing a social foraging theory

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Many animals look for their food in groups and this type of foraging raises a number of important questions that have been at the heart of my research program for the last ten years. When animals forage together, individuals can avoid investing effort in searching for food by waiting and then taking the food found by others. When does it pay to wait and scrounge? What factors make this behavior common or rare? These questions are at the center my research program and can be addressed using a mathematical technique borrowed from economics called game theory. With game theory I can predict how many individuals should scrounge and how many should search. Using use small cage birds I found that depending on circumstances individuals change their investment in one and the other foraging mode. Now I propose to study how an individual's characteristics limit its use of one and the other alternative, the mechanisms it uses to adjust its individual investment in each alternative, how having to look for several types of prey that are difficult to detect affects its use of either tactic. The same principle applies to gathering information, some individuals sample while others get the information by watching them sample, that is they use public information. I propose to use video and audio playback techniques to explore how and when individuals use visual and auditory public information. The spontaneous emergence of individuals that exploit the efforts of others, whether for finding food or collecting information, has been and will continue to be of interest to a wide range of fields, including those that study human behavior (anthropology, economics, psychology). Because exploitation is one of the main barriers to the emergence of cooperation knowing how to control it would provide a major advance of knowledge.