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Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on April 15, 2008
Behavioral Ecology 2008 19(4):836-841; doi:10.1093/beheco/arn037
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Food unpredictability drives both generalism and social foraging: a game theoretical model

Sarah E. Overingtona, Frédérique Duboisb and Louis Lefebvrea

a Department of Biology, McGill University, 1205 Ave Dr Penfield, Montréal, Québec, H3A 1B1 Canada b Département des Sciences Biologiques, Université de Montréal, Pavillon Marie-Victorin, 90 Vincent d'Indy, Montréal, Québec, H3C 3J7, Canada

Address correspondence to S.E. Overington. E-mail: sarah.overington{at}mcgill.ca.


  Abstract

Resource predictability can influence foraging behavior in many ways. Depending on the predictability of food sources, animals may specialize on a few food types or generalize on many; they may aggressively defend feeding territories or nonaggressively share food with others. However, food defense and diet breadth have generally been studied separately. In this paper, we propose that variation in resource predictability could drive both of them together. We construct a game theoretic model to test whether situations in which resources are unpredictable might favor both generalism (the ability to use multiple food types) and nonaggressive social foraging. Our model predicts that the proportion of social generalists is highest when resources are unpredictable, whereas a predictable resource distribution favors territorial specialists. We discuss our result within the context of animal cognition research, where diet breadth and social foraging are associated with the 2 dominant views of the evolution of cognition: the "ecological" and the "social brain" hypotheses. Our results suggest that social and dietary demands on cognition might be less independent than is often assumed.

Key words: ecological intelligence, game theory, generalism, hawk–dove, resource predictability, social brain hypothesis, social foraging.

Received 28 September 2007; revised 29 February 2008; accepted 2 March 2008.


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