%0 Journal Article
%T The evolution of cooperative turn-taking in animal conflict
%A Mathias Franz
%A Daniel van der Post
%A Oliver Sch¨šlke
%A Julia Ostner
%J BMC Evolutionary Biology
%D 2011
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2148-11-323
%X We found that turn-taking evolves for small resource values, alongside a contest strategy that leads to stable dominance relationships. Turn-taking leads to egalitarian societies with unclear dominance relationships and non-linear dominance hierarchies. Evolutionary stability of turn-taking emerged despite strength differences among individuals and the possibility to evolve within-fight behaviour that allows good assessment of fighting abilities. Evolutionary stability emerged from frequency-dependent effects on fitness, which are modulated by feedbacks between the evolution of within-fight behaviour and the evolution of higher-level conflict strategies.Our results reveal the impact of feedbacks between the evolution of within-fight behaviour and the evolution of higher-level conflict strategies, such as turn-taking. Similar feedbacks might be important for the evolution of other conflict strategies such as winner-loser effects or coalitions. However, we are not aware of any study that investigated such feedbacks. Furthermore, our model suggests that turn-taking could be used by animals to partition low value resources, but to our knowledge this has never been tested. The existence of turn-taking might have been overlooked because it leads to societies with similar characteristics that have been expected to emerge from scramble competition. Analyses of temporal interaction patterns could be used to test whether turn-taking occurs in animals.A fundamental assumption in animal socio-ecology is that animals compete with each other over limited resources such as food or mates. Two basic forms of competition are usually distinguished: scramble and contest [1]. Scramble competition should occur when individuals are not able to prevent others from accessing a resource. In contrast, contest competition occurs when individuals can directly influence others' access to a resource, e.g. by winning fights over monopolizable resources. The form of competition should affect how in
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/11/323