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)
Famous quotes containing the words theoretical and/or models:
“Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68Ma way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.”
—Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)
“French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisan intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)