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The interaction between aphids, ants and ladybirds has been investigated from an ecological point of view since many decades, while there are no attempts to describe it from a mathematical point of view. This paper introduces a new…
Plant-pollinator associations are often seen as purely mutualistic, while in reality they can be more complex. Indeed they may also display a diverse array of antagonistic interactions, such as competition and victim--exploiter…
To examine the co-evolution of quantitative traits in hosts and parasites, we present and study a co-evolutionary model of a social parasite-host system that incorporates (1) ecological dynamics that feed back into their co-evolutionary…
Cooperation in evolutionary biology means paying a cost, c, to enjoy benefits, b. A defector is one who does not pay any cost but enjoys the benefits of cooperators. Human societies, especially, have evolved a strategy to discourage…
Army ants perform the altruism that an ant sacrifices its own well-being for the benefit of another ants. Army ants build bridges using their own bodies along the path from a food to the nest. We developed the army ant inspired social…
We propose a simple mathematical model by applying Michaelis-Menton equations of enzyme kinetics to study the mutualistic interaction between the leaf cutter ant and its fungus garden at the early stage of colony expansion. We derive the…
Two mechanisms that have been used to study the evolution of cooperative behavior are altruistic punishment, in which cooperative individuals pay additional costs to punish defection, and multilevel selection, in which competition between…
Mutualistic interactions, where individuals from different species can benefit from each other, are widespread across ecosystems. This study develops a general deterministic model of mutualism involving two populations, assuming that…
We explore self-organizing strategies for role assignment in a foraging task carried out by a colony of artificial agents. Our strategies are inspired by various mechanisms of division of labor (polyethism) observed in eusocial insects like…
Nutrients from a flowering plant are shared by its pollinators, giving rise to competition in the latter. Such exploitative competition of pollinators can limit their abundance and affect the global organization of the mutualistic…
Understanding predator-prey relationships among insects is a challenging task in the domain of insect-colony research. This is due to several factors involved, such as determining whether a particular behavior is the result of a…
Altruistic punishment, where individuals incur personal costs to punish others who have harmed third parties, presents an evolutionary conundrum as it undermines individual fitness. Resolving this puzzle is crucial for understanding the…
Our wellbeing depends as much on our personal success, as it does on the success of our society. The realization of this fact makes cooperation a very much needed trait. Experiments have shown that rewards can elevate our readiness to…
It is widely known how the human ability to cooperate has influenced the thriving of our species. However, as we move towards a hybrid human-machine future, it is still unclear how the introduction of AI agents in our social interactions…
Strong reciprocity is a fundamental human characteristic associated with our extraordinary sociality and cooperation. Laboratory experiments on social dilemma games and many field studies have quantified well-defined levels of cooperation…
The architecture of bipartite networks linking two classes of constituents is affected by the interactions within each class. For the bipartite networks representing the mutualistic relationship between pollinating animals and plants, it…
We show that in a situation where individuals have a choice between a costly institute and a free institute to perform a collective action task, the existence of a participation cost promotes cooperation in the costly institute. Despite…
Understanding cooperative behavior in biological and social systems constitutes a scientific challenge, being the object of intense research over the past decades. Many mechanisms have been proposed to explain the presence and persistence…
Colonies of ants are systems of interacting living organisms in which interactions between individuals and their environment can produce a reliable performance of a complex tasks without the need for centralised control. Particularly…
With limited resources, competition is widespread, yet cooperation persists across taxa, from microorganisms to large mammals. Recent observations reveal contingent factors often drive cooperative interactions, with the intensity…