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  • Open Access

Social Patch Foraging Theory in an Egalitarian Group

Lisa Blum Moyse* and Ahmed El Hady†

  • *Contact another: lisa.blum-moyse@ens-lyon.fr
  • †Present address: Department of Collective Behaviour, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour, Konstanz, Germany.
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PRX Life 3, 033007 – Published 22 July, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/mqxr-1nyv

Abstract

Foraging is a widespread behavior. Specifically, social foraging can bring several benefits compared to solitary foraging, such as collective pooling of information and reducing environmental uncertainty. Based on an evidence accumulation framework, we developed a model of patch-leaving decisions in a large egalitarian group, going through two intertwined paradigms: in which habitat to forage and, inside habitats, how to balance exploration and exploitation in patches. In this paper, we define patches as small areas that are rapidly depleted, in contrast to habitats, defined as larger areas, almost nondepleted. Across these two environments, we used numerical simulations and analytical tools to quantify the collective foraging dynamics. We showed that three variables—the cohesion of a group, the mean residence times, and the accuracy in finding the best habitat—are relevant metrics to characterize the collective processes. In particular, cohesion, a less studied aspect in classical foraging approaches, characterizes the initial nonstationarity of the dynamics and is ecologically relevant as it provides risk dilution in the presence of threat. These metrics are shaped by different environment statistics, such as reward probabilities, travel time between areas, or the depletion rate. They also enable the quantification of the impact of social information. We found that these metrics are strongly modulated by social interactions and that different types of information sharing mechanisms give rise to a variety of emergent collective patterns. In particular, most interaction types increase accuracy, but have nontrivial and various effects on cohesion and exploration-exploitation tradeoff. The effects of these social interactions were similar in habitats and patches. We expect this flexible and quantitative model to be relevant for analyzing large scale foraging datasets and formulating hypotheses.

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PRX Life 3, 033007– Published 22 July, 2025
  • Received 18 December 2024
  • Accepted 2 July 2025
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