Aggregative cycles evolve as a solution to conflicts in social investment

Multicellular organization is particularly vulnerable to conflicts between different cell types when the body forms from initially isolated cells, as in aggregative multicellular microbes. Like other functions of phase, coordinated collective movement can be undermined by cells that spend energy fuelling motion and ‘cheaters’ get carried along. The evolutionary stability behaviours against such typically addressed populations undergo extrinsically imposed phases aggregation dispersal. Here, via a shift perspective, we propose cycles may have emerged way temporally compartmentalize social conflicts. Through an eco-evolutionary mathematical model accounts for individual strategies resource acquisition, address regimes where motility coexist. Particularly interesting oscillatory regime that, similarly life organisms, alternates on timescale several generations prevalent solitary living starvation-triggered aggregation. Crucially, self-organized oscillations emerge result evolution traits associated conflict escalation within aggregates.