Cooperation & Competition
44 mechanisms in this category
Allelopathy
Allelopathy is chemical niche construction where plants secrete compounds that inhibit competitor growth. Black walnut trees (Juglans nigra) produce j...
Apparent Competition
Two antelope species share a water hole. They never compete for food - different diets, different grazing patterns. But when Species A thrives, more p...
Automated Detection at Scale
Ant colonies maintain cooperation among millions of individuals who can't possibly remember each other individually. They use chemical markers - phero...
Cheater Detection
Symbiosis faces a fundamental problem: cheaters. Cooperation is evolutionarily unstable unless both parties can detect and punish cheaters. Biology s...
Coalition Formation & Dynamics
A 150-pound chimpanzee with three allies defeats a 200-pound chimpanzee alone. At Arnhem Zoo, single combat determined alpha status in only 23% of suc...
Commensalism
Commensalism: One organism benefits, the other is unaffected. Barnacles attach to whales, getting transportation across oceans. The whale doesn't care...
Consolation Behavior
After conflicts, bystanders sometimes console victims - approaching distressed individuals, grooming them, sitting close. This isn't post-conflict aff...
Cost of Unrepaired Relationships
Primatologists measured conflict frequency and reconciliation rates across primate groups. Groups with high conflict + low reconciliation rates showed...
Costly Punishment
Punishing cheaters is costly. When a bat refuses to share blood with a cheater, the punisher pays a small cost (5% of their meal that could have gone...
Crown Shyness
Crown shyness is the phenomenon where tree canopies don't overlap, creating visible gaps between adjacent trees. Trees detect nearby neighbors using f...
Defection Detection and Punishment
Coalitions require cheater detection and punishment. When detection lags and punishment is costly, defection becomes rational and coalition collapses...
Endosymbiosis
The most extreme form of symbiosis is endosymbiosis - when one organism lives inside another, and the relationship becomes so fundamental they can't s...
Exploitative Competition
Exploitative competition is the war most strategists miss. While business schools teach head-to-head battles - Coke vs. Pepsi, iPhone vs. Galaxy - the...
First-Mover Advantage
Early migrants to seasonal resources capture best territories before competitors arrive. First wildebeest to fresh grass gain nutrition advantage.
Frequency-Dependent Selection
What happens when everyone adopts the same 'optimal' strategy? It stops being optimal. Frequency-dependent selection reveals that a strategy's success...
Graduated Escalation
When boundaries fail and intruders enter, territorial animals don't immediately fight to death. They use graduated escalation - matching response inte...
Grooming as Coalition Currency
Primate coalitions are maintained through grooming - picking parasites, cleaning fur, social touching. But grooming does more than hygiene. It's the c...
Herbivory Defense
A seedling is soft, nutritious, and defenseless. Most seedlings die to herbivory in their first year. Survivors have defenses: chemical defenses (tann...
Host Sanctions
In legume-Rhizobium mutualisms, plants can sanction poor-performing bacterial partners by reducing resource allocation to ineffective nodules. Experim...
Interdependence and Co-evolution
Stable long-term mutualisms create interdependence where each partner's evolutionary fitness depends on the other's success, aligning selection pressu...
Interference Competition
Interference competition is what strategy looks like to most executives: direct conflict over resources. Lions fighting over a kill. Rams butting head...
Mutualism
A cleaner wrasse approaches a grouper ten thousand times its size. The small fish enters the predator's mouth - certain death for most species. But th...
Mycelial Networks
Dig up a handful of forest soil and you're holding 100 miles of fungal filament. Threads ten times thinner than human hair, probing between soil parti...
Mycorrhizal Associations
Most plant species form symbiotic relationships with mycorrhizal fungi. The fungi colonize plant roots, extending fungal hyphae far into soil, dramati...
Network Effects
Network effects represent a fundamental departure from biological scaling laws - and understanding this difference reveals why digital platforms can a...
Parasitism
Parasitism: One organism benefits at the other's expense. Tapeworms extract nutrients from their host's intestines. The host suffers malnutrition. Bu...
Partner Recognition
Successful mutualisms begin with partner recognition - the ability to identify suitable partners and avoid exploitation by cheaters. Legume-Rhizobium...
Path Dependence
The QWERTY keyboard was designed in the 1870s to prevent mechanical typewriter jams by separating frequently used letter pairs. It's demonstrably subo...
Perimeter Problem
Territory scaling follows cruel mathematics. As territory area increases, boundary length increases slower than area but faster than defense capacity....
Post-Conflict Affiliation
After chimpanzee conflicts, the aggressor often initiates reconciliation. This seems counterintuitive - shouldn't the victim avoid the aggressor? But...
Price Discovery
Price discovery is the emergent process by which thousands of independent buyers and sellers, each responding to local information and incentives, col...
Reciprocity and Enforcement
Once partnerships form, maintaining mutualism requires reciprocity - partners exchange benefits in ways that maintain rough balance. Biological enforc...
Reciprocity Tracking
Coalition formation works when reciprocity tracking is accurate and time horizons are long. Baboon female coalitions (Silk et al., 30-year study) demo...
Reconciliation Authenticity
Primates can detect insincere reconciliation attempts. If an aggressor approaches a victim but maintains tense body language, the victim refuses recon...
Relationship Repair Timing
Primate reconciliation timing is critical. Conflicts create stress hormones (cortisol) in both aggressor and victim. If reconciliation occurs within m...
Reputation Systems
Vampire bats use individual recognition and memory. A bat remembers: Has this individual shared with me before? Have I shared with them? Did they chea...
Resource Defense Theory
Not all animals defend territories. Territorial behavior emerges only when specific conditions are met. In 1964, Jerram Brown formulated the economic...
Satellite Male Strategy
Not all individuals defend territory. Some adopt 'satellite' or 'sneaker' strategies - exploiting defended territories without defensive costs. Ruffs...
Self-Thinning Law
As plants grow, density decreases predictably. Start with 10,000 seedlings per hectare - after 10 years: 1,000; after 50 years: 100; after 100 years:...
Shade Tolerance Spectrum
Plants exist on a spectrum of shade tolerance. Shade-intolerant species (birch, aspen, pine) require 60-100% full sunlight - in shade, growth stops. I...
Symbiosis
Walk through a rainforest and you'll see symbiosis everywhere, if you know where to look. Fungi wrap around tree roots, extending the tree's reach for...
Third-Party Enforcement
Some species have specialized cheater detectors. Cleaner fish eat parasites off larger fish (mutualism). But some cleaners bite and eat mucus instead...
Three-Party Coalition Stability
Coalitions of two are unstable. Coalitions of three can be stable but require careful balance. The geometry matters. Two-member coalitions: Member A...
Vertical Transmission
When mutualistic partners are transmitted together from one generation to the next, their reproductive interests align. Endosymbiotic bacteria (living...