Abstract
By consuming and producing environmental resources, organisms inevitably change their habitats. The consequences of such environmental modifications can be detrimental or beneficial not only to the focal organism but also to other organisms sharing the same environment. Social evolution theory has been very influential in studying how social interactions mediated by public ‘goods’ or ‘bads’ evolve by emphasizing the role of spatial structure. The environmental dimensions driving these interactions, however, are typically abstracted away. We propose here a new, environment-mediated taxonomy of social behaviors where organisms are categorized by their production or consumption of environmental factors that can help or harm others in the environment. We discuss microbial examples of our classification and highlight the importance of environmental intermediates more generally.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 6-18 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Trends in Ecology and Evolution |
Volume | 34 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2018 Elsevier Ltd
Funding
We wish to thank the Santa Fe Institute for hosting two working groups in 2016 and 2017, during which this research was conducted, and four anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions. F.D. received funding from Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR, grant 14-ACHN-0003 ). J.P. gratefully acknowledges financial support from the ANR-Labex Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) . M.E.H. thanks the McDonnell Foundation (Studying Complex Systems research award 220020294 ).
Funders | Funder number |
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ANR-Labex Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse | |
IAST | |
James S McDonnell Foundation | 220020294 |
James S McDonnell Foundation | |
Agence Nationale de la Recherche | 14-ACHN-0003 |
Agence Nationale de la Recherche |
Keywords
- dispersal
- ecology
- microbes
- niche construction
- social evolution
- spatial structure
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics