Anti-Predator Animal Vigilance

We are investigating on how to model anti-predator vigilance in social animals. There is a fundamental trade-off when it comes to animal vigilance: when animals look for predators they do not get to eat. It has been observed in nature that the cost of vigilance is shared amongst the group in social animals but how vigilance/foraging strategies are negotiated and organized is poorly understood. We are currently developing theoretical models to explain this behavior based on the insights we have found in modelling cooperative robotic swarms.