 For search scenarios, organisms must detect – and climb – noisy, long-range environmental (e.g., temperature, salinity, resource) gradients.Here, social interactions can provide substantial additional benefit by allowing individuals, simply through grouping, to average their imperfect estimates of temporal and spatial cues (the so-called ‘wisdom-of-crowds’ effect).Due to the investment necessary to obtain personal information, however, this again sets the scene for producers (searchers) to be exploited by others.