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Popular hypotheses about the origins of collective adaptation are related to two basic behaviours: protection from predators and a combined search for food resources. Among the anti-predator explanations, the predator confusion hypothesis…
The self-protection of alliances against external invaders is a key concept behind the maintenance of biodiversity in the face of natural selection. But since these alliances, which can be formed by different numbers of competitors, can…
Explaining biodiversity is a fundamental issue in ecology. A long-standing puzzle lies in the paradox of the plankton: many species of plankton feeding on a limited variety of resources coexist, apparently flouting the competitive exclusion…
We study the evolution of cooperation in a finite population interacting according to a simple model of like-with-like assortment. Evolution proceeds as a Moran process, and payoffs from the underlying cooperator-defector game are…
Formation and competition of associations are studied in a six-species ecological model where each species has two predators and two prey. Each site of a square lattice is occupied by an individual belonging to one of the six species. The…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Reaction-diffusion systems with a Lotka-Volterra-type reaction term, also known as competition-diffusion systems, have been used to investigate the dynamics of the competition among $m$ ecological species for a limited resource necessary to…
We introduce and study an evolutionary complementarity game where in each round a player of population 1 is paired with a member of population 2. The game is symmetric, and each player tries to obtain an advantageous deal, but when one of…
Patch foraging is one of the most heavily studied behavioral optimization challenges in biology. However, despite its importance to biological intelligence, this behavioral optimization problem is understudied in artificial intelligence…
We introduce a new model of competition on growing networks. This extends the preferential attachment model, with the key property that node choices evolve simultaneously with the network. When a new node joins the network, it chooses…
Foraging is a widespread behavior, and being part of a group may bring several benefits compared to solitary foraging, such as collective pooling of information and reducing environmental uncertainty. Often theoretical models of collective…
Coexistence of competing species is, due to unavoidable fluctuations, always transient. In this Letter, we investigate the ultimate survival probabilities characterizing different species in cyclic competition. We show that they often obey…
We develop a theory of generalist predation showing how alternative prey species are affected by changes in both mean abundance and variability (coefficient of variation) of their predator's primary prey. The theory is motivated by the…
Mutualistic networks are formed when the interactions between two classes of species are mutually beneficial. They are important examples of cooperation shaped by evolution. Mutualism between animals and plants plays a key role in the…
Cooperative behavior, where one individual incurs a cost to help another, is a wide spread phenomenon. Here we study direct reciprocity in the context of the alternating Prisoner's Dilemma. We consider all strategies that can be implemented…
Foraging is a fundamental behavior as animals' search for food is crucial for their survival. Patch leaving is a canonical foraging behavior, but classic theoretical conceptions of patch leaving decisions lack some key naturalistic details.…
We introduce here three complementary models to analyze the role of predation pressure in avian coloniality. Different explanations have been proposed for the existence of colonial breeding behavior in birds, but field studies offer no…
We study a complementarity game as a systematic tool for the investigation of the interplay between individual optimization and population effects and for the comparison of different strategy and learning schemes. The game randomly pairs…
Information theory has explained the organization of many biological phenomena, from the physiology of sensory receptive fields to the variability of certain DNA sequence ensembles. Some scholars have proposed that information should…
Although ant--aphid interactions are the most typical example of mutualism between insect species, some studies suggest that ant attendance is not always advantageous for the aphids because they may pay a physiological cost. In this study,…