Theoretical Models
The producer/scrounger game contains cheaters. Producers search for their own food while scroungers take the food others have found. Scroungers benefit when producers are common. Producers benefit when scroungers are rare. If there are many scroungers and few producers, the producers are easily able to find food since there is much less competition. If there are few scroungers and many producers, the scroungers can easily cheat. The scroungers are no longer competing against each other to take the producer’s food. A bird can be a scrounger. Instead of foraging for its own food, the scrounger will wait until another bird comes back with food. The next day, the scrounger will follow the successful bird to the patch. The cheating bird reaps the benefits without putting in the effort that the producer put in to find the food. Experiments on this model have been performed on the Scaly-breasted Munia.
Read more about this topic: Cheating (biology)
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