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Foraging strategies are shaped by interactions with the environment, and evolve under metabolic constraints. Optimal strategies for isolated and competing organisms have been studied extensively in the absence of evolution. Much less is understood about how metabolic constraints shape the evolution of an organism’s ability to detect and reach food. To address this question, we introduce a minimal agent-based model of the coevolution of two phenotypic attributes critical for successful foraging in crowded environments: movement speed and perceptual acuity. Under competition higher speed and acuity lead to better foraging success, but at higher metabolic cost. We derive the optimal foraging strategy for a single agent, and show that this strategy is no longer optimal for foragers in a group. We show that mutation and selection can lead to the coexistence of two strategies: A metabolically costly strategy with high acuity and velocity, and a metabolically cheap strategy. Generally, in evolving populations speed and acuity co-vary. Therefore, even under metabolic constraints, trade-offs between metabolically expensive traits are not guaranteed. 

In addition to diffusive signals, cells in tissue also communicate via long, thin cellular protrusions, such as airinemes in zebrafish. Before establishing communication, cellular protrusions must find their target cell. Here, we demonstrate that the shapes of airinemes in zebrafish are consistent with a finite persistent random walk model. The probability of contacting the target cell is maximized for a balance between ballistic search (straight) and diffusive search (highly curved, random). We find that the curvature of airinemes in zebrafish, extracted from live-cell microscopy, is approximately the same value as the optimum in the simple persistent random walk model. We also explore the ability of the target cell to infer direction of the airineme’s source, finding that there is a theoretical trade-off between search optimality and directional information. This provides a framework to characterize the shape, and performance objectives, of non-canonical cellular protrusions in general.