Group chase and escape with sight-limited chasers

• We consider the group chase and escape with two different strategies.
• We investigate the influence to the catch efficiency and to the chasing patterns.
• The optimal number of chasers for a given number of escapers is depending on strategies.
• The contradiction between hunting efficiency and energy cost is found.

We study group chase and escape with sight-limited chasers. Two search strategies, random-walk-strategy and relocation-strategy, are introduced for chasers when escapers are out of their fields of vision. There exist two regimes for the group lifetime of escapers. In the narrow sight regime, the group lifetime is a decreasing function of chasers’ sight range. In the wide sight regime, the group lifetime stays at a constant when chasers adopting random-walk-strategy while increases with the sight range when chasers adopting relocation-strategy. The impacts of the two search strategies on group chase and escape are studied by investigating the lifetime distribution of all escapers and the dependence of the minimum lifetime on the number of chasers. We also find that, to reach the most efficient and the lowest energy cost chase for chasers, the ratio between the number of chasers and escapers stays at around 6 under random-walk-strategy. However, the optimal number of chasers vanishes and the energy cost monotonically increases with increasing the number of chasers under relocation-strategy.