ESS for life-history traits of cooperating consumers facing cheating mutants

TL;DR

This paper analyzes life-history strategies of consumers exploiting resources, identifying optimal and evolutionarily stable strategies within a season, and discusses their stability and sustainability in the context of resource sharing and cheating mutants.

Contribution

It introduces a model distinguishing between optimal and ESS strategies within a season, highlighting the trade-offs and stability issues related to resource use and cheating mutants.

Findings

Optimal strategy involves resource-saving singular arc

The ESS strategy is less resource-conserving and not sustainable long-term

Mixed strategies cannot be interpreted as population shares

Abstract

We consider a population of identical individuals preying on an exhaustible resource. The individuals in the population choose a strategy that defines how they use their available time over the course of their life for feeding, for reproducing (say laying eggs), or split their energy in between these two activities. We here suppose that their life lasts a full season, so that the chosen strategy results in the production of a certain number of eggs laid over the season. This number then helps define the long-run evolution of the population since the eggs constitute the basis for the population for the next season. However, in this paper, we strictly concentrate on what occurs within a season, by considering two possible strategies: the collective optimum and the uninvadable strategy. The (collective) optimal strategy involves a singular arc, which has some resource saving feature and may, on the long-term, lead to an equilibrium. However, it is susceptible to invasion by a greedy mutant which free-rides on this resource saving strategy. Therefore, the "optimal" strategy is not evolutionarily stable. We thus look for an evolutionarily stable strategy, using the first ESS condition ("Nash-Wardrop condition"). This yields a different singular arc and a strategy that conserves less the resource. Unfortunately, we show in a forthcoming paper that, though it is an ESS, it is not long-term (interseasonal) sustainable. This is an instance of the classical "tragedy of the commons". In this paper we also investigate whether the mixed strategy on the singular arcs may be interpreted in terms of population shares using pure strategies. The answer is negative.