Social interactions drive efficient foraging and income equality in groups of fish

Abstract
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Abstract

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 - suggesting that fish may adaptively pick the subgroup of neighbors they 'listen to' to determine their own behavior.

Data availability

All data used in this work have been made available via the main author's public GitHub account: https://github.com/schneidmanlab/zebrafishForaging

Article and author information

Author details

Roy Harpaz

Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States

For correspondence
roy_harpaz@fas.harvard.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-9587-3389
Elad Schneidman

Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-8653-9848

Funding

Israeli Science Foundation (1629/12)

Roy Harpaz
Elad Schneidman

European Research Council (311238)

Roy Harpaz
Elad Schneidman

Human Frontier Science Program (RGP0065/2012)

Roy Harpaz
Elad Schneidman

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: Animal care and all the experimental procedures were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of the Weizmann Institute of Science (Protocol 17310415-2)

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.