Producers, scroungers and the price of a free meal

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In social foraging, scroungers take a disproportionately large share of the food found relative to their own food-searching efforts, while producers find more food than they manage to monopolize. We present a model of social foraging acknowledging the finder's advantage and foraging role asymmetries among individuals but incorporating the possibility that producers and scroungers differ in vigilance level and in vulnerability to predators. This allows simultaneous examination of both foraging benefits and anti-predatory aspects of grouping behaviour. Instead of seeking for equal payoff conditions, we first look for groups in which foraging character combinations and anti-predatory properties of producers and scroungers minimize the phenotype-specific predation hazard over food-intake rate,Ri/Ii, that is, fixed phenotypeRi/Iiminima. In the second approach, we allow individuals to change their foraging status to achieve lowerRi/Iiand look for combinations where it no longer pays for either producers or scroungers to change their roles, that is, evolutionarily stable group compositions, ESS. Various character combinations allow the phenotype-specific minima. In most cases, however, producers’ and scroungers’ minima are achievable only in different group compositions. The ESS combinations of producers and scroungers deviate widely from those combinations yielding phenotype-specific minima ofRi/Ii. If individuals are allowed to be flexible in adopting either a producer or a scrounger role, ESS group compositions will emerge, even though they are more expensive for both producers and scroungers in terms ofRi/Iithan group compositions yielding the phenotype-specificRi/Iiminima.