Social interactions drive efficient foraging and income equality in groups of fish.

ABSTRACT: The social interactions underlying group foraging and their benefits have been mostly studied using mechanistic models replicating qualitative features of group behavior, and focused on a single resource or a few clustered ones. Here, we tracked groups of freely foraging adult zebrafish with spatially dispersed food items and found that fish perform stereotypical maneuvers when consuming food, which attract neighboring fish. We then present a mathematical model, based on inferred functional interactions between fish, which accurately describes individual and group foraging of real fish. We show that these interactions allow fish to combine individual and social information to achieve near-optimal foraging efficiency and promote income equality within groups. We further show that the

SUBMITTER: Harpaz R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7492088 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature