Foraging refers to searching for food resources and exploiting these resources. Basically, a forager needs to search for food and there are different strategies on how to do this. What is the best strategy? We will see that the best strategy depends on the forager’s environment.
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Foraging is not restricted to animals or ancient human societies. We use the term foraging nowadays to refer to shopping in modern urban environments, such as in a supermarket or by surfing the web. In each of these cases we are looking for resources and we can follow different strategies.
One foraging strategy would be to more or less walk around randomly and hope to get lucky. If you don’t know the environment and nobody is around to advise you, this random search is the best you may do. But as you get to know the environment, you may develop a map of the landscape. This will help you to be more efficient in looking for resources. If other agents are around, you may exchange information on good locations. But what if the environment is changing frequently? Then remembering good locations does not help.
In this chapter we describe a simple model of agents foraging on a landscape. We will see how different foraging strategies can lead to different population levels in the same resource environment.