Social foraging and time of access to patch zones in rats

In social foraging situations, some members of the group tend to search for their own food sources (Producers), while others tend to join previously discovered food sources (Scroungers). Rate Maximization Model and Agent-Based Models predict that as the finder share or the number of food units that producers consume before scroungers join the patch zone decreases, the proportion of scroungers within the group increases. We propose a novel experimental preparation to study finder share effect over the proportion of scroungers in social foraging through controlling the access time to the patch zones. As the access time to discovered patch zones decreases, the opportunity to join patch zones decreases, and finder share increases. As the models predict, our results show that as the access time to the patch zones increases, the proportion of producer responses decreases, and the number of scroungers increases.