The spatial distribution of flocking foragers:disentangling the effects of food availability, interference and conspecific attraction by means of spatial autoregressive modeling

• Published in: Oikos
• Main Authors: Folmer, Eelke O., Olff, Han, Piersma, Theunis
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: IDEAL FREE DISTRIBUTION; KNOTS CALIDRIS-CANUTUS; DECISION-MAKING; WADDEN SEA; SOCIAL INFORMATION; PUBLIC INFORMATION; SELFISH HERD; ECOLOGY; HABITAT; BEHAVIOR; Calidris canutus
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/11370/711fc9eb-65c9-4cfc-941a-ffc9f0bac6e7; https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/711fc9eb-65c9-4cfc-941a-ffc9f0bac6e7; https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0706.2011.19739.x

Patch choice of foraging animals is typically assumed to depend positively on food availability and negatively on interference while benefits of the co-occurrence of conspecifics tend to be ignored. In this paper we integrate a classical functional response model based on resource availability and interference with a conspecific attraction model and use it to simulate spatial distributions of animals in their continuous resource landscapes. We consider both equilibrium and non-equilibrium distributions. We show that the integrated model produces distributions of foraging animals that closely match the distributions observed in nature. The simulations also show that under information uncertainty the locations of flocks are highly variable when conspecific attraction is strong. We furthermore explain how we can estimate the impacts of conspecific attraction and interference on the distribution of foraging animals by spatial autoregression. On the basis of simulated data we show that the separate impacts of interference and conspecific attraction can be disentangled when prior information on either is available, in addition to information on resource density and predator density, and that the total food effect is given by the spatial multiplier.