Network-based criterion for the success of cooperation in an evolutionary prisoner's dilemma

Spatial evolutionary public goods game theory applied to optimal resource allocation and defense strategies in herbaceous plants

Empirical evidence suggests that the attractiveness of a plant to herbivores can be affected by the investment in defense by neighboring plants, as well as investment in defense by the focal plant. Thus, the payoff for allocating to defense may not only be influenced by the frequency and intensity of herbivory but also by defense strategies employed by other plants in the environment. We use a combination of spatial evolutionary game theory and stochastic dynamic programming to predict the proportion of plants in the population investing in defense (cooperators) and the proportion of plants that do not (defectors). Our model accounts for metabolic costs of maintenance of stored resources when predicting optimal resource allocation to growth, reproduction, and storage; this cost is not commonly accounted for in previous models. For both annual and perennial plants, our model predicts an evolutionarily stable proportion of cooperators and defectors (mixed stable strategy), but the proportion of cooperators is higher in a population of perennial plants than in a population of annual plants. We also show that including a metabolic cost of maintaining stored resources does not change the proportion of cooperators but does decrease plant fitness and allocation to overwinter storage.

Polymorphism in rapidly changing cyclic environment

Selection in a time-periodic environment is modeled via the continuous-time two-player replicator dynamics, which for symmetric payoffs reduces to the Fisher equation of mathematical genetics. For a sufficiently rapid and cyclic (fine-grained) environment, the time-averaged population frequencies are shown to obey a replicator dynamics with a nonlinear fitness that is induced by environmental changes. The nonlinear terms in the fitness emerge due to populations tracking their time-dependent environment. These terms can induce a stable polymorphism, though they do not spoil the polymorphism that exists already without them. In this sense polymorphic populations are more robust with respect to their time-dependent environments. The overall fitness of the problem is still given by its time-averaged value, but the emergence of polymorphism during genetic selection can be accompanied by decreasing mean fitness of the population. The impact of the uncovered polymorphism scenario on the models of diversity is exemplified via the rock-paper-scissors dynamics, and also via the prisoner's dilemma in a time-periodic environment.