Collective foraging in heterogeneous landscapes

Abstract: Animals foraging alone are hypothesized to optimize the encounter rates with resources through L\'evy walks. However, the issue of how the interactions between multiple foragers influence their search efficiency is still not completely understood. To address this, we consider a model to study the optimal strategy for a group of foragers searching for targets distributed heterogeneously. In our model foragers move on a square lattice containing immobile but regenerative targets. At any instant a forager is able to detect only those targets that happen to be in the same site. However, we allow the foragers to have information about the state of other foragers. A forager who has not detected any target walks towards the nearest location, where another forager has detected a target, with probability $\exp{\left(-\alpha d\right)}$, where $d$ is the distance and $\alpha$ is a parameter. The model reveals that neither overcrowding ($\alpha\to 0$) nor independent searching ($\alpha\to\infty$) is beneficial for the group. For patchy distribution of targets the efficiency is maximum for intermediate values of $\alpha$. Also, in the limit $\alpha\to 0$, the length of the walks can become scale-free.