Patterns of Social Foraging

I will present recent results from my group that pertain to spatio-temporal patterns formed by social foragers. Starting from work on chemotaxis by Lee A. Segel (who was my PhD thesis supervisor), I will discuss why simple taxis of foragers and randomly moving prey cannot lead to spontaneous emergence of patchiness. I will then show how a population of foragers with two types of behaviours can do so. I will discuss conditions under which one or another of these behaviours leads to a winning strategy in the sense of greatest food intake. This problem was motivated by social foraging in eiderducks overwintering in the Belcher Islands, studied by Joel Heath. The project is joint with post-doctoral fellows, Nessy Tania, Ben Vanderlei, and Joel Heath.