Chirkov, V. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2026

Tracking human foragers and their prey reveals adaptive predator-prey dynamics

Hunting for mobile prey is thought to have played a key role in hominin evolution, by providing high-quality nutrition that supported the development of the exceptionally large human brain. However, human-prey dynamics remain poorly understood because studies have not yet tracked human foragers and their prey simultaneously. Here, we employ high resolution tracking of groups of human foragers (ice-fishers) and their prey (fish shoals) to study human-prey dynamics. Our results show that foragers adaptively combined personal and social information in deciding where to forage and for how long, closely matching the prey distribution. Prey responded dynamically to human exploitation, showing increased attraction to fishing activity, alongside decreased biting probability. Furthermore, we found that foragers adaptively relied on memory, preferentially returning to areas with high prey presence, particularly when their current return rate was low. Our results show how human foragers overcome the challenges of extracting invisible, mobile and reactive prey by tightly tuning patch-selection, patch-leaving and patch-return decisions to the distribution and behaviour of their prey.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Social Information Quality Determines Learned Collective Foraging Strategies

Collective foraging is widespread across the animal kingdom, allowing animals to more effectively discover resources. However, collective foragers need to balance a key trade off between private exploration and using social information. Social information can come in very distinct forms, ranging from simple positional cues to complex payoff information. However, how the types of available social cues and environmental volatility shape collective foraging behavior is not well understood. We address this using a spatially-explicit model in which agents track a mobile resource via multi-agent reinforcement learning. Agents choose between random exploration, private tracking, and social attraction. We systematically varied resource volatility and the type of available social cues to analyze their effect on individual and collective behavior. Our results show that the quality of social information dictates the emerging collective behavior. Low-quality social cues (e.g., positions, actions) result in a fragile strategy that is effective in stable environments but fails as volatility increases. Conversely, high-quality social information (e.g., payoffs) enables behavioral diversity: Agents selectively copy others and flexibly change between individual tracking or exploration depending on the environmental volatility. Our findings identify the interplay between information quality and ecological context as an important mechanism governing the emergence of distinct forms of collective behavior from individual decision rules.

biophysics↗