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Social resource foraging is guided by the principles of the Marginal Value Theorem

Optimality principles guide how animals adapt to changing environments. During foraging for nonsocial resources such as food and water, species across taxa obey a strategy that maximizes resource harvest rate. However, it remains unknown whether foraging for social resources also obeys such a strate...

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Autores principales: Turrin, Courtney, Fagan, Nicholas A., Dal Monte, Olga, Chang, Steve W. C.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5596022/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28900299
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-11763-3
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author Turrin, Courtney
Fagan, Nicholas A.
Dal Monte, Olga
Chang, Steve W. C.
author_facet Turrin, Courtney
Fagan, Nicholas A.
Dal Monte, Olga
Chang, Steve W. C.
author_sort Turrin, Courtney
collection PubMed
description Optimality principles guide how animals adapt to changing environments. During foraging for nonsocial resources such as food and water, species across taxa obey a strategy that maximizes resource harvest rate. However, it remains unknown whether foraging for social resources also obeys such a strategic principle. We investigated how primates forage for social information conveyed by conspecific facial expressions using the framework of optimal foraging theory. We found that the canonical principle of Marginal Value Theorem (MVT) also applies to social resources. Consistent with MVT, rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) spent more time foraging for social information when alternative sources of information were farther away compared to when they were closer by. A comparison of four models of patch-leaving behavior confirmed that the MVT framework provided the best fit to the observed foraging behavior. This analysis further demonstrated that patch-leaving decisions were not driven simply by the declining value of the images in the patch, but instead were dependent upon both the instantaneous social value intake rate and current time in the patch.
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spelling pubmed-55960222017-09-15 Social resource foraging is guided by the principles of the Marginal Value Theorem Turrin, Courtney Fagan, Nicholas A. Dal Monte, Olga Chang, Steve W. C. Sci Rep Article Optimality principles guide how animals adapt to changing environments. During foraging for nonsocial resources such as food and water, species across taxa obey a strategy that maximizes resource harvest rate. However, it remains unknown whether foraging for social resources also obeys such a strategic principle. We investigated how primates forage for social information conveyed by conspecific facial expressions using the framework of optimal foraging theory. We found that the canonical principle of Marginal Value Theorem (MVT) also applies to social resources. Consistent with MVT, rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) spent more time foraging for social information when alternative sources of information were farther away compared to when they were closer by. A comparison of four models of patch-leaving behavior confirmed that the MVT framework provided the best fit to the observed foraging behavior. This analysis further demonstrated that patch-leaving decisions were not driven simply by the declining value of the images in the patch, but instead were dependent upon both the instantaneous social value intake rate and current time in the patch. Nature Publishing Group UK 2017-09-12 /pmc/articles/PMC5596022/ /pubmed/28900299 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-11763-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Turrin, Courtney
Fagan, Nicholas A.
Dal Monte, Olga
Chang, Steve W. C.
Social resource foraging is guided by the principles of the Marginal Value Theorem
title Social resource foraging is guided by the principles of the Marginal Value Theorem
title_full Social resource foraging is guided by the principles of the Marginal Value Theorem
title_fullStr Social resource foraging is guided by the principles of the Marginal Value Theorem
title_full_unstemmed Social resource foraging is guided by the principles of the Marginal Value Theorem
title_short Social resource foraging is guided by the principles of the Marginal Value Theorem
title_sort social resource foraging is guided by the principles of the marginal value theorem
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5596022/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28900299
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-11763-3
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