The evolution of costly cooperative behaviour is puzzling if individuals that don't contribute to the cooperative act still gain the same benefits, but with lower costs than cooperative individuals (dilemma of public goods). The proposed project will investigate how direct fitness costs and benefits of cooperation and exploitation change under various ecological and social conditions. The expected results will provide important information on ecological and evolutionary processes that shape evolutionary transitions towards more complex sociality: group living and cooperation within a group. The expected results will also have applied importance as they will be used to predict how variation in social behavior and its consequences on individual fitness (e.g. immunology) contribute to the population dynamics of pest species under changing environmental conditions.

2020

2025