Stochasticity and non-additivity expose hidden evolutionary pathways to cooperation

Fumagalli, Sarah E.; Rice, Sean H.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0225517

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 79 publications

(181 reference statements)

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“…The pathways to cooperation and coevolution are complex and often poorly understood (Fumagalli and Rice, 2019), and our objective was to build models that offer an alternative conceptual paradigm to understand dynamical relationships among mutualistic hosts and symbionts. We cross-validated the robustness of our model conclusions by considering analytically derived equations along with more complex simulation experiments.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustained beneficial infections: priority effects, competition, and specialization drive patterns of association in intracellular mutualisms

Hill,

Lawson,

Cain

et al. 2023

Front. Ecol. Evol.

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Intracellular symbioses provide a useful system for exploring evolutionary and ecological forces that shape mutualistic partnerships. Within- and among-host competitiveness driven by different strategies that symbionts adopt as they transfer materials to the host across a sub-cellular membrane might explain patterns of host:symbiont association observed in natural systems. We tested the hypothesis that different translocation strategies employed by symbionts affect their ability to occupy host habitats using two distinct modeling approaches. The first involved constructing a deterministic, Lotka-Volterra-type model with two symbiont species competing for access to a single host. The model recovered expected behaviors of co-occupancy/coinfection as well as competitive exclusion. However, a specialization coefficient allowed advantages to accrue to one of the symbionts and permitted otherwise inferior competitors to displace superior competitors. The second approach involved developing and implementing a detailed, highly configurable, and realstic agent-based model (ABM), facilitating experimentation of multiple symbiont strategies in competition simultaneously. The ABM emphasizes bidirectional movement of materials between symbiont and host (e.g., photosynthate from algae to heterotrophic host). Competitive interactions between symbionts based on simple strategies led to exclusion of the inferior symbiont or co-occupancy of the host. As in the first model, inferior competitors could overtake superior competitors when “affinity” terms (i.e., specialization) were included in the model. Both models lay bare the importance of coevolutionary specialization as a selectively advantageous strategy, and they offer a new conceptual framework for interpreting the dynamic patterns observed in extant host and mutualist associations by challenging the idea of “host control” of outcomes, and identifying specific points where coevolutionary specialization might accrue.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustained beneficial infections: priority effects, competition, and specialization drive patterns of association in intracellular mutualisms

Hill,

Lawson,

Cain

et al. 2023

Front. Ecol. Evol.

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Altruism and natural selection in a variable environment

dos Santos,

Downing,

Griffin

et al. 2024

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Hamilton’s rule provides the cornerstone for our understanding of the evolution of all forms of social behavior, from altruism to spite, across all organisms, from viruses to humans. In contrast to the standard prediction from Hamilton’s rule, recent studies have suggested that altruistic helping can be favored even if it does not benefit relatives, as long as it decreases the environmentally induced variance of their reproductive success (“altruistic bet-hedging”). However, previous predictions both rely on an approximation and focus on variance-reducing helping behaviors. We derived a version of Hamilton’s rule that fully captures environmental variability. This shows that decreasing (or increasing) the variance in the absolute reproductive success of relatives does not have a consistent effect—it can either favor or disfavor the evolution of helping. We then empirically quantified the effect of helping on the variance in reproductive success across 15 species of cooperatively breeding birds. We found that a) helping did not consistently decrease the variance of reproductive success and often increased it, and b) the mean benefits of helping across environments consistently outweighed other variability components of reproductive success. Altogether, our theoretical and empirical results suggest that the effects of helping on the variability components of reproductive success have not played a consistent or strong role in favoring helping.

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Stochasticity and non-additivity expose hidden evolutionary pathways to cooperation

Cited by 2 publications

References 79 publications

Sustained beneficial infections: priority effects, competition, and specialization drive patterns of association in intracellular mutualisms

Sustained beneficial infections: priority effects, competition, and specialization drive patterns of association in intracellular mutualisms

Altruism and natural selection in a variable environment

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