Evolution of swarming behavior is shaped by how predators attack

10/22/2013
by   Randal S. Olson, et al.
0

Animal grouping behaviors have been widely studied due to their implications for understanding social intelligence, collective cognition, and potential applications in engineering, artificial intelligence, and robotics. An important biological aspect of these studies is discerning which selection pressures favor the evolution of grouping behavior. In the past decade, researchers have begun using evolutionary computation to study the evolutionary effects of these selection pressures in predator-prey models. The selfish herd hypothesis states that concentrated groups arise because prey selfishly attempt to place their conspecifics between themselves and the predator, thus causing an endless cycle of movement toward the center of the group. Using an evolutionary model of a predator-prey system, we show that how predators attack is critical to the evolution of the selfish herd. Following this discovery, we show that density-dependent predation provides an abstraction of Hamilton's original formulation of "domains of danger." Finally, we verify that density-dependent predation provides a sufficient selective advantage for prey to evolve the selfish herd in response to predation by coevolving predators. Thus, our work corroborates Hamilton's selfish herd hypothesis in a digital evolutionary model, refines the assumptions of the selfish herd hypothesis, and generalizes the domain of danger concept to density-dependent predation.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
09/14/2012

Predator confusion is sufficient to evolve swarming behavior

Swarming behaviors in animals have been extensively studied due to their...
research
08/08/2014

Exploring the evolution of a trade-off between vigilance and foraging in group-living organisms

Despite the fact that grouping behavior has been actively studied for ov...
research
09/13/2022

Collective Adaptation in Multi-Agent Systems: How Predator Confusion Shapes Swarm-Like Behaviors

Popular hypotheses about the origins of collective adaptation are relate...
research
06/16/2023

The Evolution theory of Learning: From Natural Selection to Reinforcement Learning

Evolution is a fundamental process that shapes the biological world we i...
research
11/15/2022

The scaling of goals via homeostasis: an evolutionary simulation, experiment and analysis

All cognitive agents are composite beings. Specifically, complex living ...
research
09/25/2016

Sooner than Expected: Hitting the Wall of Complexity in Evolution

In evolutionary robotics an encoding of the control software, which maps...
research
02/29/2016

Exploring the coevolution of predator and prey morphology and behavior

A common idiom in biology education states, "Eyes in the front, the anim...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset