Effects of Fast Hawk-Dove-Bully Game on the Dynamics of a Stage-structured Population

Abstract

In this paper, we present a review about mathematical models of population and community dynamics incorporating individual behaviour. The considered models consist in coupling a game theoretic model, going on at a fast time scale and that describes the change of tactics among individuals in a population or in a community to a model going on at a slow time scale describing the effects in the long term of individual tactics on reproduction and mortality of the populations. As application, an extension of a stage-structured population with intra-individual behavioural variability is presented. Individuals can adopt three different tactics: hawk, dove and bully. We consider a stage-structured population with immature and mature individuals. A mature individual experiences the different tactics in his life and it is assumed that the game is played at a fast time scale in comparison to population dynamics. This fast part of the model is coupled to a slow part, which describes the growth of each sub-population. By use of aggregation of variables methods, we obtain a reduced system of two differential equations governing immature and total mature sub-populations at the slow time scale. The analysis of the model shows that when the cost of fightings is smaller, the proportion of hawks is larger. The total population size equilibrium shows a maximum with respect to the gain of the game.