Impact of food distribution on lifetime of a forager with or without sense of smell

Abstract

Modeling foraging via basic models is a problem that has been recently investigated from several points of view. However, understanding the effect of the spatial distribution of food on the lifetime of a forager has not been achieved yet. We explore here how the distribution of food in space affects the forager's lifetime in several different scenarios. We analyze a random forager and a smelling forager in both one and two dimensions. We first consider a general food distribution, and then analyze in detail specific distributions including constant distance between food, certain probability of existence of food at each site, and power-law distribution of distances between food. For a forager in one dimension without smell we find analytically the lifetime, and for a forager with smell we find the condition for immortality. In two dimensions we find based on analytical considerations that the lifetime ($T$) scales with the starving time ($S$) and food density ($f$) as $T\sim S^4f^{3/2}$.