MASSOL Francois's profile
avatar

MASSOL Francois

  • UMR 9017 CIIL, CNRS, Lille, France
  • Community ecology, Dispersal & Migration, Evolutionary ecology, Food webs, Interaction networks, Spatial ecology, Metacommunities & Metapopulations, Theoretical ecology
  • recommender, administrator, manager

Recommendations:  0

Review:  1

Areas of expertise
spatial evolutionary ecology, networks, models of community ecology and biogeography, occupancy models

Review:  1

22 Nov 2021
article picture

Beating your neighbor to the berry patch

When more competitors means less harvested resource

Recommended by based on reviews by Francois Massol, Jeremy Van Cleve and 1 anonymous reviewer

In this paper, Alan R. Rogers (2021) examines the dynamics of foraging strategies for a resource that gains value over time (e.g., ripening fruits), while there is a fixed cost of attempting to forage the resource, and once the resource is harvested nothing is left for other harvesters. For this model, not any pure foraging strategy is evolutionary stable. A mixed equilibrium exists, i.e., with a mixture of foraging strategies within the population, which is still evolutionarily unstable. Nonetheless, Alan R. Rogers shows that for a large number of competitors and/or high harvesting cost, the mixture of strategies remains close to the mixed equilibrium when simulating the dynamics. Surprisingly, in a large population individuals will less often attempt to forage the resource and will instead “go fishing”. The paper also exposes an experiment of the game with students, which resulted in a strategy distribution somehow close to the theoretical mixture of strategies.

The economist John F. Nash Jr. (1950) gained the Nobel Prize of economy in 1994 for his game theoretical contributions. He gave his name to the “Nash equilibrium”, which represents a set of individual strategies that is reached whenever all the players have nothing to gain by changing their strategy while the strategies of others are unchanged. Alan R. Rogers shows that the mixed equilibrium in the foraging game is such a Nash equilibrium. Yet it is evolutionarily unstable insofar as a distribution close to the equilibrium can invade.

The insights of the study are twofold. First, it sheds light on the significance of Nash equilibrium in an ecological context of foraging strategies. Second, it shows that an evolutionarily unstable state can rule the composition of the ecological system. Therefore, the contribution made by the paper should be most significant to better understand the dynamics of competitive communities and their eco-evolutionary trajectories. 

References

Nash JF (1950) Equilibrium points in n-person games. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 36, 48–49. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.36.1.48

Rogers AR (2021) Beating your Neighbor to the Berry Patch. bioRxiv, 2020.11.12.380311, ver. 8 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.11.12.380311

 

avatar

MASSOL Francois

  • UMR 9017 CIIL, CNRS, Lille, France
  • Community ecology, Dispersal & Migration, Evolutionary ecology, Food webs, Interaction networks, Spatial ecology, Metacommunities & Metapopulations, Theoretical ecology
  • recommender, administrator, manager

Recommendations:  0

Review:  1

Areas of expertise
spatial evolutionary ecology, networks, models of community ecology and biogeography, occupancy models