Humans and other animals have a variety of psychological abilities tailored to the demands of asocial foraging, that is, foraging without coordination or competition with other conspecifics. Human foraging, however, also includes a unique element, the creation of resource pooling systems. In this type of social foraging, individuals contribute when they have excess resources and receive provisi...

Foraging is an embodied cognitive process which balances the search constraints of exploration versus exploitation. As such, foraging strategies and mechanisms offer useful insight into abstract forms of search such as visual search, problem solving, and semantic recall. We performed a series of simulations using artificial neural networks to relate metastable neuronal dynamics to observed fora...

Clonal plants are widespread throughout the plant kingdom and dominate in diverse habitats. Spatiotemporal heterogeneity of environment is pervasive at multiple scales, even at scales relevant to individual plants. Clonal integration refers to resource translocation and information communication among the ramets of clonal plants. Due to clonal integration, clonal plant species possess a series ...

As competition increases in the online world, website owners will investigate ways in which they can attract more users. Additionally, many consumers suffer ever-increasing time limitations when browsing for a particular item on a website. Users can become frustrated and stressed when they are unable to find those items due to poor information scent, or semantic cues that are meant to lead to t...

We consider a continuous mathematical description of a population of ants and simulate numerically their foraging behavior using a system of partial differential equations of chemotaxis type. We show that this system accurately reproduces observed foraging behavior, especially spontaneous trail formation and efficient removal of food sources. We show through numerical experiments that trail for...

Throughout evolution the foraging and echolocation behaviors as well as the motor systems of bats have been adapted to the tasks they have to perform while searching and acquiring food. When bats exploit the same class of environmental resources in a similar way, they perform comparable tasks and thus share similar adaptations independent of their phylogeny. Species with similar adaptations are...

As a result of environmental variability, animals may be confronted with uncertainty surrounding the presence of, or accessibility to, food resources at a given location or time. While individuals can rely on personal experience to manage this variability, the behavior of members of an individual's social group can also provide information regarding the availability or location of a food resour...

This paper gives a proof of convergence for a learning algorithm that describes how anoles (lizards found in the Caribbean) learn a foraging threshold distance. An anole will pursue a prey if and only if it is within this threshold of the anole's perch. The learning algorithm was proposed by Roughgarden and his colleagues. They experimentally determined that this algorithm quickly converges to ...

Seabirds may be able to increase their foraging efficiency by learning the whereabouts of predictable sources of prey and returning repeatedly to these locations. The occurrence of such foraging area fidelity has been little studied, particularly for pelagic species. We used satellite telemetry to study foraging behaviour and foraging area fidelity of individual chick-rearing gannets in the Nor...

We examined whether low ambient temperatures influence foraging behavior of precocial Japanese quail chicks and alter the balance between investment in growth and thermogenic function. To test this, one group of chicks was exposed to 7 degrees C and one group to 24 degrees C during foraging throughout the developmental stage. Chicks adapted well to the temperatures through a high flexibility in...