Changes in movement characteristics in response to private and social information acquisition of socially foraging fish

To overcome the cost of competition resulting from foraging socially, individuals may balance their use of private (i.e. acquired from personal sampling) and social (i.e. acquired by watching other individuals) information to adjust their foraging strategy accordingly. Reliability of private information about environmental characteristics, such as the spatial distribution of prey, is thus likely to affect individual movement and social interactions. We aimed to investigate how movement characteristics of foraging individuals changed as they acquired reliable information about the spatial occurrence of prey in a foraging context. We allowed guppies (Poecilia reticulata) to develop the reliability of their private knowledge about prey spatial occurrence by repeatedly testing shoals in a foraging task under three experimental distributions of prey: 1) aggregated prey forming three patches located in fixed locations, 2) scattered distribution of prey with random locations, or 3) no prey (us..., This dataset was collected by filming guppy shoals foraging in an experimental arena under laboratory conditions. A number of variables (viz. distance travelled, distance to nearest neighbour, acceleration entropy, time spent grouping, number and duration of grouping events) were computed from the tracking data of the first minute of the foraging trials. Statistical investigations aimed to identify changes in movement characteristics and social interactions occuring over repeated foraging trials. , R and Excel are required to access the data files.Â