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Functional responses are widely used to describe interactions and resources exchange between individuals in ecology. The form given to functional responses dramatically affects the dynamics and stability of populations and communities.…

Understanding how cognitive and social mechanisms shape the evolution of complex artifacts such as songs is central to cultural evolution research. Social network topology (what artifacts are available?), selection (which are chosen?), and…

In bio-social models, cooperative behaviour has evolved as an adaptive strategy, playing multi-functional roles. One of such roles in populations is to increase the success of survival and reproduction of individuals and their families or…

Predators often consume multiple prey and by mutually subsidizing a shared predator, the prey may reciprocally harm each other. When predation levels are high, this apparent competition can culminate in a prey species being displaced.…

The environment has a strong influence on a population's evolutionary dynamics. Driven by both intrinsic and external factors, the environment is subject to continual change in nature. To capture an ever-changing environment, we consider a…

We are losing biodiversity at an unprecedented scale and in many cases, we do not even know the basic data for the species. Traditional methods for wildlife monitoring are inadequate. Development of new computer vision tools enables the use…

Advances in computer vision as well as increasingly widespread video-based behavioral monitoring have great potential for transforming how we study animal cognition and behavior. However, there is still a fairly large gap between the…

If one isolated species is supposed to evolve following the logistic mapping, then we are tempted to think that the dynamics of two species can be expressed by a coupled system of two discrete logistic equations. As three basic…

In this paper we study the long term dynamics of two prey species and one predator species. In the deterministic setting, if we assume the interactions are of Lotka-Volterra type (competition or predation), the long term behavior of this…

Many of the observed species interactions embedded in ecological communities are not permanent, but are characterized by temporal changes that are observed along with abiotic and biotic variations. While work has been done describing and…

To effectively forage in natural environments, organisms must adapt to changes in the quality and yield of food sources across multiple timescales. Individuals foraging in groups act based on both their private observations and the opinions…

Animal grouping behaviors have been widely studied due to their implications for understanding social intelligence, collective cognition, and potential applications in engineering, artificial intelligence, and robotics. An important…

Interactions among individuals from the same-species of wild animals are an important component of population dynamics. An interaction can be either static (based on overlap of space use) or dynamic (based on movement). The goal of this…

Different explanations have been proposed for the existence of colonial breeding behavior in birds, but field studies offer no conclusive results. We analyze the interplay between learning habits and predation pressure by means of numerical…

Conflict destabilizes social interactions and impedes cooperation at multiple scales of biological organization. Of fundamental interest are the causes of turbulent periods of conflict. We analyze conflict dynamics in a monkey society model…

Rapid urbanization is a major cause of habitat and biodiversity loss and human-animal conflict. While urbanization is inevitable, we need to develop a good understanding of the urban ecosystem and the urban-adapted species in order to…

Recently, computational modelling became a very important research tool that enables us to study problems that for decades evaded scientific analysis. Evolutionary systems are certainly examples of such problems: they are composed of many…

In a previous study, we considered an information-theoretic model of code evolution. In it, agents obtain information about their (common) environment by the perception of messages of other agents, which is determined by an interaction…

We present numerical results based on a simplified ecological system in evolution, showing features of extinction similar to that claimed for the biosystem on Earth. In the model each species consists of a population in interaction with the…

Emotions are intimately tied to motivation and the adaptation of behavior, and many animal species show evidence of emotions in their behavior. Therefore, emotions must be related to powerful mechanisms that aid survival, and, emotions must…