No evidence for kin selection as an explanation for social group formation in clown anemonefish.

Social groups in which some individuals forgo reproduction and others reproduce, are one of the most remarkable products of evolution. To fully understand these social groups, we must understand both why non-breeders tolerate their situation and why breeders tolerate non-breeders. In general, breeders tolerate non-breeders because they help provision the breeders' offspring or the breeders themselves, but in some vertebrate societies the benefits that breeders accrue from non-breeders are surprisingly hard to detect.

The Animal-AI Environment: A virtual laboratory for comparative cognition and artificial intelligence research.

The Animal-AI Environment is a unique game-based research platform designed to facilitate collaboration between the artificial intelligence and comparative cognition research communities. In this paper, we present the latest version of the Animal-AI Environment, outlining several major features that make the game more engaging for humans and more complex for AI systems. These features include interactive buttons, reward dispensers, and player notifications, as well as an overhaul of the environment's graphics and processing for significant improvements in agent training time and quality of the human player experience.

Calculating Relatedness: A Pedigree of Definitions.

Biology can be viewed from both an organismal and a genic perspective. A good example is W.D.

Microbial warfare and the evolution of symbiosis.

Cooperative symbionts enable their hosts to exploit a diversity of environments. A low genetic diversity (high relatedness) between the symbionts within a host is thought to favour cooperation by reducing conflict within the host. However, hosts will not be favoured to transmit their symbionts (or commensals) in costly ways that increase relatedness, unless this also provides an immediate fitness benefit to the host.

Visual odometry of Rhinecanthus aculeatus depends on the visual density of the environment.

Distance travelled is a crucial metric that underpins an animal's ability to navigate in the short-range. While there is extensive research on how terrestrial animals measure travel distance, it is unknown how animals navigating in aquatic environments estimate this metric. A common method used by land animals is to measure optic flow, where the speed of self-induced visual motion is integrated over the course of a journey.

Kin discrimination, negative relatedness, and how to distinguish between selfishness and spite.

Spiteful behaviors occur when an actor harms its own fitness to inflict harm on the fitness of others. Several papers have predicted that spite can be favored in sufficiently small populations, even when the harming behavior is directed indiscriminately at others. However, it is not clear that truly spiteful behavior could be favored without the harm being directed at a subset of social partners with relatively low genetic similarity to the actor (kin discrimination, causing a negative relatedness between actor and harmed recipient).

Uncovering the rules of microbial community invasions.

Understanding the ecological and evolutionary processes determining the outcome of biological invasions has been the subject of decades of research with most work focusing on macro-organisms. In the context of microbes, invasions remain poorly understood despite being increasingly recognized as important. To shed light on the factors affecting the success of microbial community invasions, we perform simulations using an individual-based nearly neutral model that combines ecological and evolutionary processes.

Crystal toxins and the volunteer's dilemma in bacteria.

The growth and virulence of the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis depend on the production of Cry toxins, which are used to perforate the gut of its host. Successful invasion of the host relies on producing a threshold amount of toxin, after which there is no benefit from producing more toxin. Consequently, the production of Cry toxin appears to be a different type of social problem compared with the public goods scenarios that bacteria usually encounter.