Meerkat foraging behaviour modelling

Suricata suricatta or known as meerkats are social-living mongoose from the Herpestidae group and live in the desert of southern Africa. They colonise in social groups that co-operate in vigilance, territorial defence and co-operative breeding. Similar to other social-animals, meerkats also exhibit behaviours such as nursing, scent marking and grooming. In this work, meerkats' foraging, and communications behaviour are modelled and simulated using NetLogo simulation tool. The performance of three foraging styles (walk-and-eat, stop-and-eat & inspect-and-eat) are studied in depth. Agents are divided into groups of 4 for populations of 16 and groups of 5 for populations of 20. These agents performed two tasks simultaneously while foraging around the world. The first task is to make links with nearest agents and forage within group. The second task is to detect agents with food using vision and approach them. There are three types of visions that helps agent to forage which are eating-vision; corresponds to sensing the food while eating, distance-vision; corresponds to sensing the foods, and turn-towards-vision; corresponds towards any neighbour agents detected eating within world. By using these visions, communications between meerkats are simulated. Walk-and-eat is used as foraging style and different patches' amounts are applied to distance-vision, eating-vision and turn-towards-vision. This simulation is to evaluate visions impact on time needed to forage for food by meerkats. The location of nest and food are fixed in the arena and agents can move freely to forage. Result shows that the inspect-and-eat foraging style took longer time compare to others due to the need of searching, digging, avoiding attack from prey and always be vigilant are time consuming. Furthermore, by increasing the visibility range of the agent it will lead to more efficient foraging since the agent takes shorter time to find and eat the food.