The following model description is limited to those aspects needed to gain a reasonable understanding of the results, with key parameters listed in Table 1. For further details see Section 1 in Additional file 1. Table 1List of key parameters and variablesNameDescriptionValues R Number of resources species250 Q r Maximum energy reward of resource type r N(0.1,0.1) H r Practice time needed before obtaining half the maximal reward0.1..10 S r Scalar for the sigmoid function describing how rewards increase with practice1..4 EC Rate at which resource types are replaced by new types0..R types per year N Population size100 G Maximum number of foragers in a group20COPY_SPACEDistance at which foragers can observe what their neighbors are doing20 K Effectiveness of observational learning0.1 M Maximal time to process and consume a resource item1 min a ir Expected reward forager i has for resource type r any a ie Expected quality of the environment of forager i any e ir Energy reward forager i obtains from resource type r any c ir Certainty of forager i about reward obtained from resource type r 0.. inf s ir Skill of forager i for processing resource type r 0..1 t ir Experience (total time) forager i as processing resource type r 0.. inf λ i Reinforcement learning rate0..1 ε i Exploration rate0..1 γ i Stimulus enhancement0..1 ω i Probability to OBSERVE neighbor0..1 τ i Duration of OBSERVE0.01..1 min ϕ i Update parameter for a ie 0..1 δ i MOVE distance of forager i 0.. infUpper case letters and names: invariant parameters that do not change during simulations. Lower case letters: (learning) variables that change during a forager’s lifetime. Greek letters: parameters that can evolve but are invariant during a forager’s lifetime. Subscripts: i= forager identity; r= resource type