"Ecological principles for the evolution of communication in collective systems"Staps, MerlijnWhy do honeybees have a dance language to share information about the location of food sources, while bumblebees locate food sources independently? Why do some ant colonies regulate foraging using trail pheromones while others rely on direct interactions between individuals? Inspired by such questions, we developed a simple mathematical model to study the forces that shape whether and how individuals share information in a collective context, primarily focusing on advanced collectives such as social insect colonies and multicellular organisms. We find that whether and how members of a collective evolve to share environmental information strongly depends on the ecological circumstances that a collective faces. First, communication only evolves in sufficiently stable environments, where the costs of sensing are high enough to disfavor independent sensing but not so high that the optimal strategy is to ignore the environment altogether. Moreover, trade-offs between signaling costs, signal quality (how informative the signal is), and signal reach (how many individuals receive it) drive the evolution of diverse signals that differ in the frequency, duration, and persistence of signaling. Altogether, our work provides a general framework for comparing communication strategies found in nature and uncovers simple ecological principles that may, at least in part, explain their diversity. |
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