When humans play evolutionary games with animal species

Abstract

Taking into account of a rapidly growing literature studying the negative effects of changes in animal behaviour induced by human activities on ecological dynamics, biodiversity preservation, and human well-being, we model the interaction between a population of humans and a population of animals by means of an evolutionary game. In such a game, we assume that humans can adopt two alternative behaviours (strategies), one with a high environmental impact (HI) and the other with a low impact (LI). Animals also have two alternative behaviours: they can behave in a typical (T) or non-typical (NT) way. The former corresponds to the natural strategy animals would typically adopt in the absence of human interference (e.g. hunting prey) while the latter can be seen as an adaptive behaviour adopted by animals to defend themselves from the negative consequences of human action, or to opportunistically benefit of food resources that human activity may provide as a by-product. The analysis of our model shows that the adoption process of the strategies HI, LI, NT, T can generate a great variety of dynamic regimes, even if the ecological context we consider is very simple. The main purpose of this work is to propose a new research line in ecological modelling and to highlight a policy issue that has been largely ignored thus far: how to link the battle against biodiversity loss with the fight against species behavioural typicality loss.