Related papers: Facultative predation can alter the ant-aphid popu…
Cooperative behavior is widespread in nature, even though cooperating individuals always run the risk to be exploited by free-riders. Population structure effectively promotes cooperation given that a threshold in the level of cooperation…
The origin of altruistic behavior, i.e. the behavior that is useful for a population or a species but goes at the expense of an altruistic individual, has long been a challenge for students of evolutionary biology. The populations with…
It has been an old unsolved puzzle to evolutionary theorists on which mechanisms would increase large-scale cooperation in human societies. Thus, how such mechanisms operate in a biological network is still not very understood. This study…
In plant-pollinator communities many pollinators are potential generalists and their preferences for certain plants can change quickly in response to changes in plant and pollinator densities. These changes in preferences affect coexistence…
In ecology, foraging requires animals to expend energy in order to obtain resources. The cost of foraging can be reduced through kleptoparasitism, the theft of a resource that another individual has expended effort to acquire. Thus,…
A model of an Ant System where ants are controlled by a spiking neural circuit and a second order pheromone mechanism in a foraging task is presented. A neural circuit is trained for individual ants and subsequently the ants are exposed to…
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…
An agent choosing between various actions tends to take the one with the lowest cost. But this choice is arguably too rigid (not adaptive) to be useful in complex situations, e.g., where exploration-exploitation trade-off is relevant in…
Reciprocity characterizes the information exchange between users in a network, and some empirical studies have revealed that social networks have a high proportion of reciprocal edges. Classical directed preferential attachment (PA) models,…
Cooperation is beneficial for the species as a whole, but, at the level of an individual, defection pays off. Natural selection is then expected to favor defectors and eliminate cooperation. This prediction is in stark contrast with the…
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.…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
Currently available dynamic optimization strategies for Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm offer a trade-off of slower algorithm convergence or significant penalty to solution quality after each dynamic change occurs. This paper…
We compare and contrast the long-time dynamical properties of two individual-based models of biological coevolution. Selection occurs via multispecies, stochastic population dynamics with reproduction probabilities that depend nonlinearly…
The fact that humans cooperate with non-kin in large groups, or with people they will never meet again, is a long-standing evolutionary puzzle with profound implications. Cooperation is linked to altruism, the capacity to perform costly…
Mutualistic interactions, which are beneficial for both interacting species, are recurrently present in ecosystems. Observations of natural systems showed that, if we draw mutualistic relationships as binary links between species, the…
The provision of additional food (AF) sources to an introduced predator has been identified as a mechanism to improve pest control. However, AF models with prey dependent functional responses can cause unbounded growth of the predator…
A mathematical model of garden ants (Laius japonicus) is introduced herein to investigate the relationship between the distribution of the degree of stochasticity in following pheromone trails and the group foraging efficiency. Numerical…
In freshwater ecosystems, aquatic insects that ontogenetically shift their habitat from aquatic to terrestrial play vital roles as prey subsidies that move nutrients and energy from aquatic to terrestrial food webs. As a result, these…
The aim of our study is to describe the dynamics of ant battles, with reference to laboratory experiments, by means of a chemical stochastic model. We focus on ants behavior as an interesting topic in order to predict the ecological…