Emergence of multiple foraging strategies under competition

Foraging strategies are shaped by interactions with the environment, and evolve under metabolic constraints. Optimal strategies for isolated and competing organisms have been studied extensively in the absence of evolution. Much less is understood about how metabolic constraints shape the evolution of an organism’s ability to detect food and move through its environment to find it. To address this question, we introduce a minimal agent-based model of the coevolution of two phenotypic attributes critical for successful foraging in crowded environments: movement speed and perceptual acuity. Under competition higher speed and acuity lead to better foraging success, but at higher metabolic cost. We derive the optimal foraging strategy for a single agent, and show that this strategy is no longer optimal for foragers in a group. We show that mutation and selection can lead to the coexistence of two strategies: A metabolically costly strategy with high acuity and velocity, and a metabolically cheap strategy. Generally, in evolving populations speed and acuity co-vary. Therefore, even under metabolic constraints, trade-offs between metabolically expensive traits are not guaranteed.