A Model of Noncooperative Foraging in Social Insects

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Abstract

We present a model of foraging that applies to social insects foraging without recruitment, cooperation, or communication in the search for or retrieval of food. It simulates a colony's foraging via a series of differential equations that quantify the forager activity, the food-source dynamics, the interactions of foragers and food sources, and the colony's energy budget for foraging, defined as the number of nonforagers that the foragers can feed. At the colonial level, the influence of the number of foragers and the size of the foraging area is examined; the colony's social structure, in which only a small proportion of workers forage, greatly limits its potential benefit, leading to the definition of a maximum socially compatible foraging benefit. This is measured in relation to forager characteristics (size and the possession or lack of a memory of food-source location) and to food-source characteristics (size and duration of availability). Foragers without memory obtain their highest benefit when the food sources equal in size their load-carrying capacity, but those with memory can exploit sources several times larger with nearly maximum benefit. There is always one forager size that achieves a maximum benefit greater than that of other sizes. Increasing the sources' duration of availability, or decreasing the competition for them, increases this size. Larger foragers achieve their maximum benefit with larger foraging areas and lower foraging densities. For sources of intermediate size and long availability, a large forager without memory has a higher benefit than a small one with memory; with short availability, the reverse is true. It is predicted that social insects foraging without recruitment or cooperation tend to group into two classes. One is characterized by large colonies, foragers, foraging areas, and prey, low foraging densities, and aggressive territorial behavior; the other class is the inverse.

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