Energy Dynamics and Partial Consumption in Foraging

TL;DR

This paper investigates how partial food consumption based on a threshold affects a forager's lifetime, revealing scaling laws, a transition threshold, and complex behaviors in food depletion and revisits.

Contribution

It introduces a model of partial food consumption with a threshold, analyzing its impact on forager lifetime and site depletion, revealing new scaling laws and transition phenomena.

Findings

Lifetime increases with threshold ratio k/S.

Transition threshold k* scales as √S.

Lifetime follows a power law τ ∼ S^β with varying β.

Abstract

In this work, we consider partial consumption of food by a forager in presence of a threshold energy level. The forager considered here can survive for $S$ steps without food, namely the survival time. The threshold limits the consumption of food in such a way that, the forager will only consume food, whenever its energy is below the threshold $k$. Due to partial consumption of food, a site containing food may not always be fully depleted, which in turn helps in increasing the lifetime of the forager. It has been observed that, in our case, the lifetime always increases with $k/S$, although there is a transition threshold $k^*$ below which the increase of lifetime is rapid and above is low. The transition threshold $k^* \sim \sqrt{S}$. The lifetime $\tau$ shows a power law behavior as $\tau \sim S^{\beta}$. For $k/S=0$, the value of $\beta$ is $4/3$, it then jumps above $2$ and decreases gradually to $1.84$ with increasing $k/S$. Other important quantities like number of revisits to a site, food statistics etc. have been studied and these also show some interesting scaling behavior. The collection of sites either fully or partially depleted of food after the death of the forager $N_{eat}$ shows a crossover behaviour for $k/S \sim 0.5$.