A temporal model of territorial defence with antagonistic interactions

Abstract

Territorial behaviour is an important part of the lives of many animals. Once a territory has been acquired, an animal may spend its entire life on it, and may have to repeatedly defend it from conspecifics. Some species make great investments in the defence of a territory, and this defence can be costly, in terms of time, energy and risk of injury. Time costs in particular have rarely been explicitly factored into such models. In this paper we consider a model of territorial defence which includes both population dynamic and time delay elements, building upon recent advances in time constraint models. Populations may divide into two distinct types, where one type makes no effort to control territories. We shall call this type nomads, and the other type territorials. Here the territory owners must divide their time between patrolling and foraging, and this balance is their only strategic decision. We show how to find the evolutionarily stable patrolling strategy and the population composition of territorials and nomads, and consider some examples demonstrating key situations. We see that both time constraints and population density pressure are crucial to influencing behaviour. In particular we find cases with both territorial individuals and nomads where a mixed, either pure or both pure patrolling strategies are evolutionarily stable. In different conditions either nomads or territorials can be absent, and indeed for a significant range of parameter combinations the population can exhibit tristability, with three distinct ecologically stable population compositions: with both nomads and territorials, only nomads or only territorials.

Territorial or nomadic? Geo-social determinants of location-based IT use: a study in Pokémon GO

“…Research in the field of evolutionary psychology suggests that human territorial behaviour, especially territory control, evolved as there was a survival benefit from controlling resourceful areas (Varga et al, 2020). From this perspective, territoriality is linked to safety as well as resource control (Edney, 1974;Varga et al, 2020). It can be argued that primal territorial control tendencies have not disappeared from society, rather they have transformed to new forms in processes parallel with industrialization and digitization (Cupers, 2017;Malmberg, 1980).…”

“…The nomadic lifestyle of seeking new areas is an instinctive response for avoiding depletion of local resources (Grove, 2009). There are costs related to territorial control which come in the forms of energy spent on patrolling the area (Varga et al, 2020), and stress required to anticipate and react to potential territorial invasions. Hence, in particular in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, movement and seeking new areas was frequent and a necessary survival strategy (Grove, 2009).…”

“…Past work shows that territorial control is a strongly social endeavour (Varga et al, 2020). When humans still lived in hunter-gatherer tribes, these tribes reserved territorial resources for the exclusive use of their in-group (Edney, 1974).…”

“…In our case, we look at both territorial control (Abdullah et al, 2014;Papangelis et al, 2017b) and explorationstyles of playing. Controlling is related to patrolling behaviour (Varga et al, 2020) along with observing who else is playing in the same area (Abdullah et al, 2014). It also involves staying alert and reacting to territorial invasions.…”

Best Reply Player Against Mixed Evolutionarily Stable Strategy User

“…One of the possible biological examples for a well-mixed game with repetition is the territorial behavior (Morrell and Kokko 2005 ), when the neighbors are fixed while the floaters randomly arrive to fight for the owners’ territory (Varga et al. 2020 ). Clearly, the game repetition opens lots of questions if the players can collect information about their partners and they have memory.…”