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Monday Seminar: Nov. 27, Luc-Alain Giraldeau of Université du Québec à Montréal on "Evolutionary Game Theory In the Lab"
4pm in Biosciences West (map), Room 301 Host: Anna Dornhaus Today's grad student lunch will be in Room 302 at Noon. |
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Talk Abstract
Traditionally behavioural ecologists assume that ESS solutions to games achieved by selection acting on alternative strategies are equivalent and identical to behavioural solutions to these games achieved by adjusting allocation to alternatives through experience. Studying games in the laboratory allows us to explore this assumption. The social interactions of animals over food resources has been organised under a unified framework known as Social Foraging Theory, characterized by an evolutionary game-theoretic approach to foraging problems. Here I review my research on the producer-scrounger (PS) game. In a PS game, individuals must decide whether to search for their own food (use producer) or wait until a producer finds and usurp a share of its discovery (use scrounger). I first review the evidence that food joining in groups of birds such as the nutmeg mannikin (Lonchura punctulata), a small, granivorous, estrildid conforms to a rate-maximizing PS game. The birds alternate from one mutually exclusive foraging mode to the other and apparently adjust their investment in each according to experience. I show that birds can, by behavioural adjustment, reach the same solutions as the ESS expected as the result of the operation of selection. I argue that solutions achieved by flexible behavioural allocation can nonetheless challenge the usual classification of ESS solutions to evolutionary games and point out some problems concerning the evolutionary origin of such behavioural flexibility. |
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