Social foraging and time of access to patch zones in rats

\tIn 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. 

在社会觅食情境中，群体中的某些成员倾向于搜寻自身的食物来源（生产者），而另一些成员则倾向于加入先前发现的食源（觅食者）。率最大化模型与基于智能体模型预测，随着发现者的共享份额或生产者在觅食者加入区域前所消耗的食物单位数量的减少，群体中觅食者的比例将上升。本研究提出一种新颖的实验设计，旨在通过控制对区域区间的访问时间来探究发现者份额效应对社会觅食中觅食者比例的影响。随着对已发现区域区间的访问时间缩短，加入区域区间的机会降低，而发现者份额增加。正如模型所预测，我们的研究结果揭示，随着对区域区间的访问时间延长，生产者响应的比例下降，而觅食者的数量增加。