Search results for "automimicry"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Ecological conditions alter cooperative behaviour and its costs in a chemically defended sawfly
2018
The evolution of cooperation and social behaviour is often studied in isolation from the ecology of organisms. Yet, the selective environment under which individuals evolve is much more complex in nature, consisting of ecological and abiotic interactions in addition to social ones. Here, we measured the life-history costs of cooperative chemical defence in a gregarious social herbivore, Diprion pini pine sawfly larvae, and how these costs vary under different ecological conditions. We ran a rearing experiment where we manipulated diet (resin content) and attack intensity by repeatedly harassing larvae to produce a chemical defence. We show that forcing individuals to allocate more to coope…
Parameterising a public good: how experiments on predation can be used to predict cheat frequencies
2016
Chemical defence is superficially easy to understand as a means for individuals to protect themselves from enemies. The evolution of chemical defence is however potentially complex because such defences may cause the generation of a public good, protecting members of the population as a whole as well as individuals that deploy toxins defensively. If a public good of protection exists, it may be exploited and degraded by “cheats” that do not invest in defence. This can in turn lead to complex frequency (and density) dependent effects in toxin evolution. To investigate this we used ecologically relevant predators (Great tits, Parus major) and examined how individual and public benefits vary d…
Data from: Ecological conditions alter cooperative behaviour and its costs in a chemically defended sawfly
2018
The evolution of cooperation and social behaviour is often studied in isolation from the ecology of organisms. Yet, the selective environment under which individuals evolve is much more complex in nature, consisting of ecological and abiotic interactions in addition to social ones. Here we measured the life-history costs of cooperative chemical defence in a gregarious social herbivore, Diprion pini pine sawfly larvae, and how these costs vary under different ecological conditions. We ran a rearing experiment where we manipulated diet (resin content) and attack intensity by repeatedly harassing larvae to produce a chemical defence. We show that forcing individuals to allocate more to coopera…