Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA.
Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM, 87501, USA.
Sci Rep. 2017 Aug 24;7(1):9364. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-06574-5.
Alternative behavioral strategies typically differ in their associated risks, meaning that a different variance in fitness-related outcomes characterizes each behavior. Understanding how selection acts on risk preference is crucial to interpreting and predicting behavior. Despite much research, most theoretical frameworks have been laid out as optimization problems from the individual's perspective, and the influence of population dynamics has been underappreciated. We use agent-based simulations that implement competition between two simple behavioral strategies to illuminate effects of population dynamics on risk-taking. We explore the effects of inter-generational reproduction dynamics, population size, the number of decisions throughout an individual's life, and simple alternate distributions of risk. We find that these factors, very often ignored in empirical and theoretical studies of behavior, can have significant and non-intuitive impacts on the selection of alternative behavioral strategies. Our results demonstrate that simple rules regarding predicted risk preference do not hold across the complete range of each of the factors we studied; we propose intuitive interpretations for the dynamics within each regime. We suggest that studies of behavioral strategies should explicitly take into account the species' life history and the ecological context in which selection acted on the risk-related behavior of the organism of interest.
替代行为策略通常在其相关风险方面存在差异，这意味着每种行为的与适应性相关的结果都存在不同的差异。了解选择如何作用于风险偏好对于解释和预测行为至关重要。尽管进行了大量研究，但大多数理论框架都是从个体的角度作为优化问题来制定的，而对种群动态的影响则被低估了。我们使用基于代理的模拟来实现两种简单行为策略之间的竞争，以阐明种群动态对冒险行为的影响。我们探讨了代际繁殖动态、种群大小、个体一生中做出决策的次数以及简单的风险替代分布等因素的影响。我们发现，这些在行为的实证和理论研究中经常被忽视的因素，可能对替代行为策略的选择产生重大且非直观的影响。我们的结果表明，关于预期风险偏好的简单规则并不适用于我们研究的每个因素的整个范围；我们对每个规则内的动态提出了直观的解释。我们建议，关于行为策略的研究应该明确考虑物种的生活史以及选择对所关注生物的与风险相关的行为起作用的生态背景。
