Abstract

Researchers (specially mathematicians and physicists) have developed during the last years the so-called “Stochastic optimal foraging theory”, which tries to incorporate explicitly spatial effects and movement into the evolutionary tradeoffs driving biological foraging.   From the formal point of view, the field has focused much on the idea of computing Mean First-Passage Times (MFPTs), or related measures, of a random walker (representing a biological organism) through a target (representing food). Then, minimization of these MFP Ts with respect to the random-walk parameters is conveniently interpreted as an optimal foraging strategy.  However, the extension of this idea to social/collective foraging is not straightforward, as it introduces many new ingredients (individual vs collective optimization, the role of interactions and communication, ...) into the equation. Finding simple, practical and robust statistical measures/currencies of foraging under these conditions represents a beautiful open problem at the frontier between ecology and mathematics. The idea of the talk is to present some key aspects about this problem I find particularly interesting, and then open a discussion about its multiple solutions/branches.