Speaker

Root Gorelick

Title

"Attracting a mate can also attract a predator: What should an individual do?"

Abstract

Signals used in mate attraction can sometimes 'backfire' and unintentionally attract predators. What signaling strategy should an individual use to maximize its fitness (ie: its number of matings) when subject to such predation risk? If individual animals signal only once during their lifetime and do this in isolation from other individuals who may be signaling, then this becomes a simple optimization problem. Things get more complicated, however, if males reside in a group and signal to attract females. Group dynamics can result in strategic behavior of individuals (eg: satellite non-signaling males). At least one member of the group must call to attract females to the group, but that individual is then subjected to higher rates of predation than other members of the group while not necessarily benefiting by securing more matings. This is akin to a one-stage prisoners dilemma. When this game is played repeatedly, individuals trade-off their probability of mating today with their probability of living and mating in the future (ie: dynamic programming), and many new optimal strategies may be available to individuals. I outline the methods for attacking these one-stage and repeated games, including a discussion of the appropriate equilibrium concepts. My principle goal is to model the maintenance of genetic variation in a population, which is intuitively plausible with this model due to (1) genotypes being strategies and (2) the plethora of equilibria that can arise in repeated games. The greater the number of equilibrial strategies available to individuals in the population, the greater the genetic variation in the population.