When group size increases, animals from a wide range of taxa reduce vigilance and increase feeding rate, the so-called group size effect. This effect requires that group members display plastic behavioral responses both in terms of vigilance and foraging to obtain the security benefit from...

When animals live in groups, individuals can invest in resources themselves or exploit the investments of other group members. Grouping with kin may reduce the frequency of exploitation because kin selection should favor individuals that imposed fewer costs on their kin. However, taking into...

Animal decision making is influenced by past experience in many biological contexts such as mating, avoiding predators, and foraging. In behavioral games, what constitutes a good or bad decision about which alternative to use depends on the behavior of other individuals. Solutions to games can...

Animals sample their surrounding environment to collect information, which can be obtained personally or by tracking the behavior of others (i.e., social information). Although social information appears to be generally advantageous, it can also be detrimental and may even conflict with personal...

When foraging group sizes increase, animals generally decrease the time devoted to antipredator detection and increase their foraging rate, the commonly reported group size effect. The increased foraging rate is thought to follow from increased safety from predators because as group size...

When animals forage in groups, individuals can search for food themselves (producer tactic) or they can search for and join other individuals that have located food (scrounger tactic). The scrounger tactic may provide greater antipredator benefits than the producer tactic because "scroungers"...

Producer--scrounger (PS) game-theoretical foraging models make predictions about the decision of group-feeding animals either to look for food (produce) or for opportunities to exploit the discoveries of other foragers (scrounge). We report the most complete demonstration to date of the...

We examined the effect of patch size and competitor number on aggression among house sparrows, Passer domesticus, foraging at patches of seven different sizes in a doubling series (0.014, 0.029, 0.058, 0.116, 0.230, 0.462, and 0.922 m-super-2). Contrary to our expectations, the birds did not...

When foraging in groups, animals frequently use either scramble or contest tactics to obtain food at clumps found by others. The question of which competitive tactic should be used has been addressed from two different perspectives: a simple optimality approach and a game theoretic approach....