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 we saw in Chapter 15. 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. Later in the chapter we will focus on direct interference from other individuals, such as kleptoparasitism, where others actively try to steal food from those who have found it first. Before we do that, however, we will investigate indirect interference, where the presence of others simply means that there is less food available for any individual. We focus on the important idea of the Ideal Free Distribution (IFD) that we first met in Section 7.2.2.1 as Parker’s matching principle.
