Consuming and grouping: Resource-mediated animal aggregation
We demonstrate that a simplistic foraging rule for a consumer in a spatially explicit resource environment leads to consumer grouping. Although consumer groups sweeping through the renewing resource environment represents the model's dynamical attractor, for short time scales (represented by a constant total consumer population) three different distributions emerge. At low consumer density, population distributions are variable and spatially fixed, but not grouped. Moving groups erupt at intermediate consumer densities. At high consumer density, there is no spatial variability in the resource and consumer densities. Similar results have been observed in a variety of empirical systems. The results suggest interesting insights will arise by examining social interactions within a resource-consumer modeling framework.
Duke Scholars
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Related Subject Headings
- Ecology
- 4104 Environmental management
- 4102 Ecological applications
- 3103 Ecology
- 0603 Evolutionary Biology
- 0602 Ecology
- 0501 Ecological Applications
Citation
Published In
DOI
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Ecology
- 4104 Environmental management
- 4102 Ecological applications
- 3103 Ecology
- 0603 Evolutionary Biology
- 0602 Ecology
- 0501 Ecological Applications