{
  "abstract": "How search strategies evolve in finite, depletable landscapes remains a question in foraging theory. We study this problem with an evolutionary simulation in which agents forage on a two-dimensional toroidal lattice containing non-renewable resources distributed uniformly or as Lévy dust. Each agent carries a heritable genome encoding step lengths, velocities, and turning angles, and selection acts on a fitness function combining energetic gain, movement cost, and coverage efficiency. By allowing movement traits to evolve without imposing a prescribed power-law step-length distribution, we test whether evolved trajectories are better described by intermittent-search or Lévy-walk dynamics. Our results indicate that evolved search is more consistent with intermittent dynamics than with strict scale-free Lévy motion in the finite depletion-driven landscapes considered here. We characterize the dynamics by fitting second- and fourth-order displacement moments to intermittent-search and Lévy-walk models. While a Lévy-like random walk fits the evolutionary trajectories well (mean adjusted $R^2$ > 0.9 in most tested conditions), intermittent search achieves a closer fit (mean adjusted $R^2$ > 0.99) for all tested resource distributions. This preference holds across the tested grid sizes and resource densities. Five independent evolutionary runs per environment on a 503 x 503 grid at nominal resource density $ρ$ = 0.15 reproduce this preference for the uniform environment and five Lévy-dust environments. Evolution rapidly reshapes the movement genome toward short displacements while retaining a sparse tail of longer relocations, consistent with local exploitation punctuated by occasional transfer. The framework provides a controlled setting for studying how search rules emerge under resource limitation and may inform resource-constrained exploration in autonomous systems.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": "2609.39239",
  "author_total": 4,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Shailendra Bhandari"
    },
    {
      "name": "Alex Szorkovszky"
    },
    {
      "name": "Anis Yazidi"
    },
    {
      "name": "Pedro G. Lind"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/4mays8ge1xygf.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.48550/arxiv.2609.39239",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "4mays8ge1xygf",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39239",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": "CC0-1.0",
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "arxiv",
      "cs.NE"
    ],
    [
      "arxiv",
      "q-bio.PE"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "1312|Diffusion and Search Dynamics"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7215101804",
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.39239",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-09-30",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/4mays8ge1xygf.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:25:52Z",
      "native_id": "2609.39239",
      "source": "arxiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39239"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "biology",
      "origin": "arxiv:q-bio.PE",
      "subfield": "evolutionary-biology"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Evolutionary foraging in grids: Intermittent search dynamics emerge in finite, depletable landscapes",
  "title_text": "Evolutionary foraging in grids: Intermittent search dynamics emerge in finite, depletable landscapes",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:25:52Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/4mays8ge1xygf",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "versions": []
}