Abstract
Understanding cooperation in animal social groups remains a significant challenge for evolutionary theory. Observed behaviours that benefit others but incur some cost appear incompatible with classical notions of natural selection; however, these behaviours may be explained by concepts such as inclusive fitness, reciprocity, intra-specific mutualism or manipulation. In this work, we examine a seemingly altruistic behaviour, the active recruitment of conspecifics to a food resource through signalling. Here collective, cooperative behaviour may provide highly nonlinear benefits to individuals, since group functionality has the potential to be far greater than the sum of the component parts, for example by enabling the effective tracking of a dynamic resource. We show that due to this effect, signalling to others is an evolutionarily stable strategy under certain environmental conditions, even when there is a cost associated to this behaviour. While exploitation is possible, in the limiting case of a sparse, ephemeral but locally abundant nutrient source, a given environmental profile will support a fixed number of signalling individuals. Through a quantitative analysis, this effective carrying capacity for cooperation is related to the characteristic length and time scales of the resource field.
Highlights
In many systems subject to evolutionary pressure, there exists a discrepancy between behaviour that is adaptive at the individual level and that which would be most beneficial for higher levels of social or biological organization
One of the key challenges facing evolutionary theory is understanding how cooperation and communication evolve in social systems
In many situations cooperation leads to higher net benefits to all, but a population of cooperators is vulnerable to invasion from exploitative strategies
Summary
In many systems subject to evolutionary pressure, there exists a discrepancy between behaviour that is adaptive at the individual level and that which would be most beneficial for higher levels of social or biological organization. While a cooperative, enlightened approach results in higher average net benefits to all, an individual that contributes nothing but benefits from the behaviour of others will hold an advantage. This fitness differential allows the invasion of non-cooperators, to the detriment of the collective [2]. Despite this issue, examples of altruism and cooperation abound in the natural world [3]. Open questions remain, notably concerning the relative importance of different drivers of cooperation amongst non-kin [7], the effects of synergistic interactions on the evolutionary dynamic [8,9], and how to engender optimal, cooperative solutions in artificial or social systems [10,11]
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