IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/beheco/v23y2012i5p977-991..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

When should animals share food? Game theory applied to kleptoparasitic populations with food sharing

Author

Listed:
  • Christoforos Hadjichrysanthou
  • Mark Broom

Abstract

Animals adopt varied foraging tactics in order to survive. Kleptoparasitism, where animals attempt to steal food already discovered by others, is very common among animal species. In this situation, depending on the ecological conditions, challenged animals might defend, share, or even retreat and leave their food to the challenger. A key determinant of the likely behavior is the nature of the food itself. If food is discovered in divisible clumps, it can be divided between animals in a number of ways. This is the general assumption in one type of game-theoretical model of food stealing, producer–scrounger models. Alternatively, food items may be essentially indivisible, so that sharing is impossible and either the attacker or the defender must retain control of all of the food. This is the assumption of the alternative game-theoretical models of kleptoparasitism. In this paper, using a game-theoretic approach, we relax this assumption of indivisibility and introduce the possibility of limited food sharing behavior between animals in kleptoparasitic populations. Considering the conditions under which food sharing is likely to be common, it is shown that food sharing should occur in a wide range of ecological conditions. In particular, if food availability is limited, the sharing process does not greatly reduce the short-term consumption rate of food and food defense has a high cost and/or a low probability of success, then the use of the food sharing strategy is beneficial. Thus, the assumption of the indivisibility of food items is an important component of previous models.

Suggested Citation

  • Christoforos Hadjichrysanthou & Mark Broom, 2012. "When should animals share food? Game theory applied to kleptoparasitic populations with food sharing," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 23(5), pages 977-991.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:beheco:v:23:y:2012:i:5:p:977-991.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/ars061
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jeffrey R. Stevens & David W. Stephens, 2002. "Food sharing: a model of manipulation by harassment," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 13(3), pages 393-400, May.
    2. M. Broom & G. D. Ruxton, 2003. "Evolutionarily stable kleptoparasitism: consequences of different prey types," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 14(1), pages 23-33, January.
    3. Ian M. Hamilton & Lawrence M. Dill, 2003. "The use of territorial gardening versus kleptoparasitism by a subtropical reef fish (Kyphosus cornelii) is influenced by territory defendability," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 14(4), pages 561-568, July.
    4. Isabel M. Smallegange & Jaap van der Meer, 2009. "The distribution of unequal predators across food patches is not necessarily (semi)truncated," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 20(3), pages 525-534.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Douglas A. Eifler & Maria A. Eifler, 2014. "Social foraging in the lizard Ameiva corax," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 25(6), pages 1347-1352.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Martin Hinsch & Ido Pen & Jan Komdeur, 2013. "Evolution of defense against depletion of local food resources in a mechanistic foraging model," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 24(1), pages 245-252.
    2. Rappoldt, Cornelis & Stillman, Richard A. & Ens, Bruno J., 2010. "A geometrical model for the effect of interference on food intake," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 221(2), pages 147-151.
    3. Chowdhury, Noble & Kentiba, Kirubel & Mirajkar, Yashwant & Nasseri, Mana & Rychtář, Jan & Taylor, Dewey, 2020. "Kleptoparasitic interactions modeling varying owner and intruder hunger awareness," Theoretical Population Biology, Elsevier, vol. 136(C), pages 31-40.
    4. Allert Imre Bijleveld & Eelke Olov Folmer & Theunis Piersma, 2012. "Experimental evidence for cryptic interference among socially foraging shorebirds," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 23(4), pages 806-814.
    5. Jessica L Barker & Pat Barclay & H Kern Reeve, 2013. "Competition over Personal Resources Favors Contribution to Shared Resources in Human Groups," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(3), pages 1-9, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:beheco:v:23:y:2012:i:5:p:977-991.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/beheco .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.