Information and the generalist predator problem

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A case for environmental statistics of early-life effects

There is enduring debate over the question of which early-life effects are adaptive and which ones are not. Mathematical modelling shows that early-life effects can be adaptive in environments that have particular statistical properties, such as reliable cues to current conditions and high autocorrelation of environmental states. However, few empirical studies have measured these properties, leading to an impasse. Progress, therefore, depends on research that quantifies cue reliability and autocorrelation of environmental parameters in real environments. These statistics may be different for social and non-social aspects of the environment. In this paper, we summarize evolutionary models of early-life effects. Then, we discuss empirical data on environmental statistics from a range of disciplines. We highlight cases where data on environmental statistics have been used to test competing explanations of early-life effects. We conclude by providing guidelines for new data collection and reflections on future directions. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Developing differences: early-life effects and evolutionary medicine’

The ecology of information: an overview on the ecological significance of making informed decisions

Information is characterized as the reduction of uncertainty and by a change in the state of a receiving organism. Thus, organisms can acquire information about their environment that reduces uncertainty and increases their likelihood of choosing a best-matching strategy. We define the ecology of information as the study of how organisms acquire and use information in decision-making and its significance for populations, communities, landscapes and ecosystems. As a whole, it encompasses the reception and processing of information, decision-making, and the ecological consequences of making informed decisions. The first two stages constitute the domains of, e.g. sensory ecology and behavioral ecology. The exploration of the consequences of information use at larger spatial and temporal scales in ecology has lagged behind these other disciplines. In our overview we characterize information, discuss statistical decision theory as a quantitative framework to analyze information and decision-making, and discuss potential ecological ramifications. Rather than attempt a cursory review of the enormity of the scope of information we highlight information use in development, breeding habitat selection, and interceptive eavesdropping on alarm calls. Through these topics we discuss specific examples of ecological information use and the emerging ecological consequences. We emphasize recurring themes: information is collected from multiple sources, over varying temporal and spatial scales, and in many cases links heterospecifics to one another. We conclude by breaking from specific ecological contexts to explore implications of information as a central organizing principle, including: information webs, information as a component of the niche concept, and information as an ecosystem process. With information having such an enormous reach in ecology we further cast a spotlight on the potential harmful effects of anthropogenic noise and info-disruptio

Biological information in an ecological context

No abstract

Evolution of trust and trustworthiness: social awareness favours personality differences

Interest in the evolution and maintenance of personality is burgeoning. Individuals of diverse animal species differ in their aggressiveness, fearfulness, sociability and activity. Strong trade-offs, mutation–selection balance, spatio-temporal fluctuations in selection, frequency dependence and good-genes mate choice are invoked to explain heritable personality variation, yet for continuous behavioural traits, it remains unclear which selective force is likely to maintain distinct polymorphisms. Using a model of trust and cooperation, we show how allowing individuals to monitor each other's cooperative tendencies, at a cost, can select for heritable polymorphisms in trustworthiness. This variation, in turn, favours costly ‘social awareness’ in some individuals. Feedback of this sort can explain the individual differences in trust and trustworthiness so often documented by economists in experimental public goods games across a range of cultures. Our work adds to growing evidence that evolutionary game theorists can no longer afford to ignore the importance of real world inter-individual variation in their models

Estimating individual contributions to population growth: evolutionary fitness in ecological time

Ecological and evolutionary change is generated by variation in individual performance. Biologists have consequently long been interested in decomposing change measured at the population level into contributions from individuals, the traits they express and the alleles they carry. We present a novel method of estimating individual contributions to population growth and changes in distributions of quantitative traits and alleles. An individual's contribution to population growth is an individual's realized annual fitness. We demonstrate how the quantities we develop can be used to address a range of empirical questions, and provide an application to a detailed dataset of Soay sheep. The approach provides results that are consistent with those obtained using lifetime estimates of individual performance, yet is substantially more powerful as it allows lifetime performance to be decomposed into annual survival and fecundity contributions