Signalling and the evolution of cooperative foraging in dynamic environments.

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,

SUBMITTER: Torney CJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3178622 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature