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Kleptoparasitism and Game Theory

While game theory is commonly approached and studied among humans, it also plays a massive role in the behavior and decisions of animals as well. This is especially true as animals gauge their best chance of survival: as with the occurrence of kleptoparasitism, or when animals take food “belonging” to another animal. This activity is frequent among many species, such as insects, birds, primates, and carnivores. After evaluating their challenger, animals will make the decision to either defend their food, share, or abandon it entirely, a decision that mirrors those faced in standard game theory.

The study by Hadjichrysanthou, et. al. found that in many of these scenarios, animals will ultimately make the decision to share their food. This strategy avoids the negative consequences of defense such as energy expenditure or injury. It can also result in positive “payoffs” such as mating opportunities or reciprocated sharing. Together, these two roles form the producer-scrounger game, where the producer is the animal discovering the food source, and the scrounger is the kleptoparasite. When the payoffs for each role are the same (that is, the scroungers and producers receive the same payoff), there is equilibrium in a system. In order for this to occur, however, scroungers must be rare: if they become abundant, the producers are over-exploited. As with any real-life game theory situation, however, it is a far more complex topic than simply all animals equally sharing all the food resources. Many ecological factors play into this dilemma. This includes population density, available food resources, divisibility of the resource, and behavioral tendencies developed by the species that influences their aggressiveness. All of these variables impact the strategies and game theory of animal species when approaching survival. 

Citation:

Christoforos Hadjichrysanthou, Mark Broom, When should animals share food? Game theory applied to kleptoparasitic populations with food sharing, Behavioral Ecology, Volume 23, Issue 5, September-October 2012, Pages 977–991

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