Collective foraging in spatially complex nutritional environments

Mathieu Lihoreau (1) , Michael Charleston (2) , Alistair M. Senior (2) , Fiona J Clissold , David Raubenheimer (2) , Stephen J. Simpson (2) , Jerome Buhl (3)

1 CRCA - Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale - UMR5169
2 The University of Sydney
3 University of Adelaide

One contribution of 13 to a theme issue 'Physiological determinants of social behaviour in animals'. Subject Areas: behaviour, computational biology, ecology, physiology 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 constrains the ability of individuals to balance their nutrient intake, the lowest performance being attained in environments with small isolated patches of nutritionally complementary foods. Social interactions improve individual regulatory performances when food is scarce and clumpy, but not when it is abundant and scattered, suggesting that collective foraging is favoured in some environments only. These social effects are further amplified if foragers adopt flexible search strategies based on their individual nutritional state. Our model provides a conceptual and predictive framework for developing new empirically testable hypotheses in the emerging field of social nutrition. This article is part of the themed issue 'Physiological determinants of social behaviour in animals'.

Mots clés: spatial ecology; foraging; social interactions; collective behaviour; individual-based model; nutritional geometry

Domaines: Ecologie, Environnement; Biologie animale; Alimentation et Nutrition

Mathieu Lihoreau, Michael Charleston, Alistair M. Senior, Fiona J Clissold, David Raubenheimer, et al.. Collective foraging in spatially complex nutritional environments. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. B (1887–1895), 2016, ⟨10.1098/rstb.2016.0238⟩. ⟨hal-02105105⟩