TY - JOUR TI - Social interactions drive efficient foraging and income equality in groups of fish AU - Harpaz, Roy AU - Schneidman, Elad A2 - Rutz, Christian A2 - Berman, Gordon J A2 - Peleg, Orit VL - 9 PY - 2020 DA - 2020/08/25 SP - e56196 C1 - eLife 2020;9:e56196 DO - 10.7554/eLife.56196 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.56196 AB - The social interactions underlying group foraging and their benefits have been mostly studied using mechanistic models replicating qualitative features of group behavior, and focused on a single resource or a few clustered ones. Here, we tracked groups of freely foraging adult zebrafish with spatially dispersed food items and found that fish perform stereotypical maneuvers when consuming food, which attract neighboring fish. We then present a mathematical model, based on inferred functional interactions between fish, which accurately describes individual and group foraging of real fish. We show that these interactions allow fish to combine individual and social information to achieve near-optimal foraging efficiency and promote income equality within groups. We further show that the interactions that would maximize efficiency in these social foraging models depend on group size, but not on food distribution, and hypothesize that fish may adaptively pick the subgroup of neighbors they ‘listen to’ to determine their own behavior. KW - social foraging KW - collective behavior KW - zebrafish KW - behavioral modeling KW - information processing KW - social interactions JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -