ABSTRACT
When animals forage for food, they often do so in groups. There are many potential benefits to foraging in groups, but also many disadvantages, as shown in Chapter 16. In this chapter we shall ignore all external influences such as the risk of predation, and concentrate on the effect of the presence of group-mates on foraging success. We first investigate indirect interference, where the presence of others simply means that there is less food available for any individual. We consider the important idea of the Ideal Free Distribution (IFD). We study the IFD for single and multiple species and discuss deviations from IFD. Later in the chapter also focus on direct interference from other individuals, such as kleptoparasitism, where others actively try to steal food from those who have found it first.
