"Rent dissipation is defined as the total expenditure of resources by all agents attempting to capture a rent or prize." It's an interesting concept, but seems to be slightly different from what I meant. In the situations above, wolves eat your surplus without spending much resources.
In that case it's a related topic called "rent seeking", I think. The second paper I linked above talks about how simple models of rent seeking predict total rent dissipation, but the paper wants to challenge that.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.