Abstract
Organisms may reduce uncertainty regarding how best to exploit their environment by collecting information about resource distribution. We develop a model to demonstrate how competition can facilitate or constrain an individual's ability to use information when acquiring resources. As resource distribution underpins both selection on information use and the strength and nature of competition between individuals, we demonstrate interdependencies between the two that should be common in nature. Individuals in our model can search for resources either personally or by using social information. We explore selection on social information use across a comprehensive range of ecological conditions, generalizing the producer–scrounger framework to a wide diversity of taxa and resources. We show that resource ecology—defined by scarcity, depletion rate and monopolizability—determines patterns of individual differences in social information use. These differences suggest coevolutionary processes linking dominance systems and social information use, with implications for the evolutionary demography of populations.
Highlights
Organisms must secure resources such as food, mates and safety from predation to ensure survival and reproduction
We present a general model to predict how resource competition will affect individual information use across a comprehensive range of ecological conditions, generating novel insights into the behavioural processes underlying the evolution of social systems
Our aim was to explore the interdependencies between information use and competition over resources, driven by proportion scrounging rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org Proc
Summary
Organisms must secure resources such as food, mates and safety from predation to ensure survival and reproduction. Variability in the spatio-temporal distribution of these resources means that individuals face uncertainty regarding how best to exploit them. Resource distribution underpins the strength and nature of competition between individuals [3,4,5]. Despite this convergence in resource distribution as a selective force, very little is known about how competition might facilitate or constrain information use. We present a general model to predict how resource competition will affect individual information use across a comprehensive range of ecological conditions, generating novel insights into the behavioural processes underlying the evolution of social systems
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