Luck in Food Finding Affects Individual Performance and Population Trajectories

Energy harvesting by animals is important because it provides the power needed for all metabolic processes. Beyond this, efficient food finding enhances individual fitness [1] and population viability [2], although rates of energy accumulation are affected by the environment and food distribution. Typically, differences between individuals in the rate of food acquisition are attributed to varying competencies [3], even though food-encounter rates are known to be probabilistic [4]. We used animal-attached technology to quantify food intake in four disparate free-living vertebrates (condors, cheetahs, penguins, and sheep) and found that inter-individual variability depended critically on the probability of food encounter. We modeled this to reveal that animals taking rarer food, such as apex predators and scavengers, are particularly susceptible to breeding failure because this variability results in larger proportions of the population failing to accrue the necessary resources for their young before they starve and because even small changes in food abundance can affect this variability disproportionately. A test of our model on wild animals indicated why Magellanic penguins have a stable population while the congeneric African penguin population has declined for decades. We suggest that such models predicting probabilistic ruin can help predict the fortunes of species operating under globally changing conditions.