Biology subjects

Kleshnina, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Kleshnina, M..

6 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Network reciprocity reshaped by environmental knowledge and feedback

Cooperative interactions often unfold in environments that are shaped by collective behavior, yet how knowledge about such changing environments feeds back into evolutionary dynamics remains poorly understood. While network reciprocity explains how spatial structure enables clusters of cooperators to emerge and grow under certain conditions, it typically ignores how individuals respond to environmental change. Here, we integrate stochastic environmental feedback with network reciprocity to examine how knowledge about environmental state shapes the evolution of cooperation in structured populations. We compare regimes in which individuals either condition their behavior on the current state or remain unaware of it. Under weak selection, we derive a simple condition showing that cooperation is favored when the benefit-to-cost ratio exceeds a modified classic reciprocity threshold accounting for the effect of environmental transitions and state knowledge. Environmental shifts can either promote or hinder cooperation depending on accessibility and fidelity of state knowledge. Counterintuitively, greater knowledge does not universally enhance cooperation: for certain transition rules, state awareness raises the critical threshold for cooperation, a phenomenon we term a "knowledge curse". Our results reveal that, in an ever-changing environment, cooperation in structured populations emerges from a subtle interplay between environmental feedback and information availability.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2022

The effect of environmental information on evolution of cooperation in stochastic games

Many human interactions feature the characteristics of social dilemmas where individual actions can have consequences for the group and the environment. The feedback between behavior and environment can be studied with the framework of stochastic games. In stochastic games, the state of the environment can change, depending on the choices made by group members. Past work suggests that such feedback can reinforce cooperative behaviors. In particular, cooperation can evolve in stochastic games even if it is infeasible in each separate repeated game. In stochastic games, participants have an interest in conditioning their strategies on the state of the environment. Yet in many applications, precise information about the state could be scarce. Here, we study how the availability of information (or lack thereof) shapes evolution of cooperation. Already for simple examples of two state games we find surprising effects. In some cases, cooperation is only possible if there is precise information about the state of the environment. In other cases, cooperation is only possible if there is no information about the state of the environment. We systematically analyze all stochastic games of a given complexity class, to determine when receiving information about the environment is better, neutral, or worse for evolution of cooperation.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2021

Synergy of turbulence and fishing reduce aquatic biomass

A universal scaling relationship exists between organism abundance and body size1,2. Within ocean habitats this relationship deviates from that generally observed in terrestrial systems2-4, where marine macro-fauna display steeper size-abundance scaling than expected. This is indicative of a fundamental shift in food-web organization, yet a conclusive mechanism for this pattern has remained elusive. We demonstrate that while fishing has partially contributed to the reduced abundance of larger organisms, a larger effect comes from ocean turbulence: the energetic cost of movement within a turbulent environment induces additional biomass losses among the nekton. These results identify turbulence as a novel mechanism governing the marine size-abundance distribution, highlighting the complex interplay of biophysical forces that must be considered alongside anthropogenic impacts in processes governing marine ecosystems.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2021

Universal allometry from empirical parameters

Allometric settings of population dynamics models are appealing due to their parsimonious nature and broad utility when studying system level effects. Here, we parameterise the size-scaled Rosenzweig-Macarthur ODEs to eliminate prey-mass dependency. We define the functional response term to match experiments, and examine situations where metabolic theory derivations and observation diverge. We produce dynamics consistent with observation. Our parameterisation of the Rosenzweig-Macarthur system is an accurate minimal model across 15+ orders of mass magnitude.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Mistakes can stabilise the dynamics of rock-paper-scissors games

A game of rock-paper-scissors is an interesting example of an interaction where none of the pure strategies strictly dominates all others, leading to a cyclic pattern. In this work, we consider an unstable version of rock-paper-scissors dynamics and allow individuals to make behavioural mistakes during the strategy execution. We show that such an assumption can break a cyclic relationship leading to a stable equilibrium emerging with only one strategy surviving. We consider two cases: completely random mistakes when individuals have no bias towards any strategy and a general form of mistakes. Then, we determine conditions for a strategy to dominate all other strategies. However, given that individuals who adopt a dominating strategy are still prone to behavioural mistakes in the observed behaviour, we may still observe extinct strategies. That is, behavioural mistakes in strategy execution stabilise evolutionary dynamics leading to an evolutionary stable and, potentially, mixed co-existence equilibrium. Author summaryA game of rock-paper-scissors is more than just a childrens game. This type of interactions is often used to describe competition among animals or humans. A special feature of such an interaction is that none of the pure strategies dominates, resulting in a cyclic pattern. However, in wild communities such interactions are rarely observed by biologists. Our results suggest that this lack of cyclicity may stem from imperfectness of interacting individuals. In other words, we show analytically that heterogeneity in behavioural patterns may break a cyclic relationship and lead to a stable equilibrium in pure or mixed strategies.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Shifts in evolutionary balance of microbial phenotypes under environmental changes

Environmental conditions shape entire communities by driving microbial interactions. These interactions then find their reflection in the evolutionary outcome of microbial competition. In static, homogeneous environments a robust, or evolutionary stable, outcome in microbial communities is reachable, if it exists. However, introducing heterogeneity and time-dependence in microbial ecology leads to stochastic evolutionary outcomes determined by specific environmental changes. We utilise evolutionary game theory to provide insight into phenotypic competition in dynamic environments. We capture these effects in a perturbed evolutionary game describing microbial interactions at a phenotypic level. We show that under regular periodic environmental fluctuations a stable state that preserves dominant phenotypes is reached. However, rapid environmental shifts, especially in a cyclic interactions, can lead to critical shifts in the evolutionary balance among phenotypes. Our analysis suggests that an understanding of the robustness of the systems current state is necessary to understand when system will shift to the new equilibrium. This can be done by understanding the systems overall margin of safety, that is, what level of perturbations it can take before its equilibrium changes. In particular, the extent to which an environmental shift affects the systems behaviour.

microbiology↗