Marten Canopy Hunt Lab (2D)

This 2D companion turns the 3D lab's orbiting forest scene into a readable chemotaxis model. Every prey animal on the map is a scent source whose concentration falls off as a Gaussian with spread σ; a marten senses the analytic gradient of the sum of every active source and steers toward it, blended with random exploration by the scent-sensitivity slider. Moving costs energy quadratically with speed, so a full-speed chase is expensive — a marten that runs its energy down stops hunting and rests until it recovers, the same cost-benefit trade-off that governs real foraging decisions. When several martens reach the same prey in the same instant, the catch isn't automatic: interference competition resolves it with a probability that falls as more hunters contend for one target, and every loser still pays the energetic cost of the chase — exactly how crowding measurably lowers per-hunter intake in real predator populations, made visible instead of just implied by extra models standing around a resource.