Collective foraging in spatially complex nutritional environments.

ABSTRACT: Nutrition impinges on virtually all aspects of an animal's life, including social interactions. Recent advances in nutritional ecology show how social animals often trade-off individual nutrition and group cohesion when foraging in simplified experimental environments. Here, we explore how the spatial structure of the nutritional landscape influences these complex collective foraging dynamics in ecologically realistic environments. We introduce an individual-based model integrating key concepts of nutritional geometry, collective animal behaviour and spatial ecology to study the nutritional behaviour of animal groups in large heterogeneous environments containing foods with different abundance, patchiness and nutritional composition. Simulations show that the spatial distribution of foods

SUBMITTER: Lihoreau M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5498299 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature