Dresden 2011 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 7: Posters: Statistical Physics in Biological Systems

BP 7.9: Poster

Monday, March 14, 2011, 17:15–20:00, P3

Phase transitions in competitive foraging of bats — Pia Backmann and •Alexander K. Hartmann — Universität Oldenburg

Foraging of animals is driven by competition, hence it can be seen as complex system of interacting individuals. Each animal has the aim to increase its profit by developing different foraging strategies.

We use an Individual Based Model to optimize the competitive foraging of bats feeding from nectar - a renewable resource - by improving the bats’ ability to perceive, if the individual profit of a flower is high or not.

It shows, that a higher notice of flower quality yields to applying different foraging strategies and thus to individually and globally better harvesting results.

We use the Kullback-Leibler-Divergence to show that the more foraging is optimized, the more do bats divide their habitat into territories, several for each bat, so the intersection in resources is lower and flower-visits more efficient.

We find a phase transition between a solvable and a not-solvable phase for finding a given target amount of nectar. By applying finite-size scaling we find the critical exponent ν = 1.9(3) describing the growing correlation when approaching the phase transition.