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Punish the thief-coevolution of defense and cautiousness stabilizes ownership.

ABSTRACT: ABSTRACT:Ownership of non-controllable resources usually has to be maintained by costly defense against competitors. Whether defense and thus ownership pays in terms of fitness depends on its effectiveness in preventing theft. We show that if the owners' willingness to defend varies in the population and information about it is available to potential thieves then the ability to react to this information and thus avoid being attacked by the owner is selected for. This can lead to a positive evolutionary feedback between cautiousness in intruders and aggressiveness in owners. This feedback can maintain ownership when the actual direct effectiveness of defense in reducing theft is very low or even absent, effectively turning defense into punishment. We conclude that the deterrence effect of defense in many situations could be stronger than that of prevention and that for many real-world scenarios the purpose of defense of resources might be to punish rather than to drive away intruders. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT:Many animals defend resources against conspecifics. Resource defense can usually only evolve if its costs are paid for by foiling attempts at theft. We show that if potential thieves can detect differences in aggressiveness between owners then cautious intruders and aggressive owners coevolve so that in the end even ineffective defense deters thieves and maintains ownership. This result greatly extends the number of situations in which we expect resource defense to evolve and has the potential to unify the concepts of defense and punishment.

SUBMITTER: Hinsch M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5486837 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Punish the thief-coevolution of defense and cautiousness stabilizes ownership.

Hinsch Martin M Komdeur Jan J

Behavioral ecology and sociobiology 20170616 7

<h4>Abstract</h4>Ownership of non-controllable resources usually has to be maintained by costly defense against competitors. Whether defense and thus ownership pays in terms of fitness depends on its effectiveness in preventing theft. We show that if the owners' willingness to defend varies in the population and information about it is available to potential thieves then the ability to react to this information and thus avoid being attacked by the owner is selected for. This can lead to a positi ...[more]

PMID: 28706342

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Project description:BackgroundHost resistance and viral pathogenicity are determined by molecular interactions that are part of the evolutionary arms race between viruses and their hosts. Viruses are obligate intracellular parasites and entry to the host cell is the first step of any virus infection. Commonly, viruses enter host cells by binding cell surface receptors. We adopt a computational modeling approach to study the evolution of the first infection step, where we consider two possible levels of resistance mechanism: at the level of the binding interaction between the host receptor and a virus binding protein, and at the level of receptor protein expression where we use a standard gene regulatory network model. At the population level we adopted the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model. We used our multi-scale model to understand what conditions might determine the balance between use of resistance mechanisms at the two different levels.ResultsWe explored a range of different conditions (model parameters) that affect host evolutionary dynamics and, in particular, the balance between the use of different resistance mechanisms. These conditions include the complexity of the receptor binding protein-protein interaction, selection pressure on the host population (pathogenicity), and the number of expressed cell-surface receptors. In particular, we found that as the receptor binding complexity (understood as the number of amino acids involved in the interaction between the virus entry protein and the host receptor) increases, viruses tend to become specialists and target one specific receptor. At the same time, on the host side, the potential for resistance shifts from the changes at the level of receptor binding (protein-protein) interaction towards changes at the level of gene regulation, suggesting a mechanism for increased biological complexity.ConclusionsHost resistance and viral pathogenicity depend on quite different evolutionary conditions. Viruses may evolve cell entry strategies that use small receptor binding regions, represented by low complexity binding in our model. Our modeling results suggest that if the virus adopts a strategy based on binding to low complexity sites on the host receptor, the host will select a defense strategy at the protein (receptor) level, rather than at the level of the regulatory network - a virus-host strategy that appears to have been selected most often in nature.

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Punish the thief-coevolution of defense and cautiousness stabilizes ownership.

Publications

Punish the thief-coevolution of defense and cautiousness stabilizes ownership.

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