Wood distillate (WD) is an environmentally safe bio-based product stimulating plant growth and yield allowed in Italy organic farming. To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies on effects WD spontaneous plants growing among crops, including their functional traits such as biomass. test effects, we carried out a lab experiment artificially reconstructed arable communities composed five ...

One of the most intriguing issues in animal behaviour is that of altruism, particularly between unrelated individuals. For if such altruism is not reciprocated, biologists believe that it would not be able to persist as cheats would win out. So when does it pay to help others? One puzzling case is that of prey mobbing potential predators. Members of many species of small birds will mob a potent...

Although cooperative systems can persist in nature despite the potential for exploitation by noncooperators, it is often observed that small changes in population demography can tip the balance of selective forces for or against cooperation. Here we consider the role of population density in the context of microbial cooperation. First, we account for conflicting results from recent studies by d...

of a thesis at the University of Miami. Evidence suggests that smiles can function as signals of cooperative intent—by producing a smile, the smiler can expect to receive benefits from perceivers and perceivers can expect a return from smilers. However, this type of signal is seemingly susceptible to the evolution of cheats who smile in the absence of cooperative intent, thereby receiving the b...

Microbial cells rely on cooperative behaviours that can breakdown as a result of exploitation by cheats. Recent work on cheating in microbes, however, has produced examples of populations benefiting from the presence of cheats and/or cooperative behaviours being maintained despite the presence of cheats. These observations have been presented as evidence for selection favouring cheating at the ...

Why should organisms cooperate with each other? Helping close relatives that are likely to share the same genes (kin selection) is one important explanation that is likely to apply across taxa. The production of metabolically costly extracellular iron-scavenging molecules (siderophores) by microorganisms is a cooperative behaviour because it benefits nearby conspecifics. We review experiments f...

BACKGROUND Co-evolutionary struggles between dangerous enemies (e.g., brood parasites) and their victims (hosts) lead to the emergence of sophisticated adaptations and counter-adaptations. Salient host tricks to reduce parasitism costs include, as front line defence, adult enemy discrimination. In contrast to the well studied egg stage, investigations addressing the specific cues for adult enem...

BACKGROUND Health knowledge and literacy are among the main determinants of health. Assessment of these issues via Web-based surveys is growing continuously. Research has suggested that approximately one-fifth of respondents submit cribbed answers, or cheat, on factual knowledge items, which may lead to measurement error. However, little is known about methods of discouraging cheating in Web-ba...

We present adversarial agent work being done in a real-time asynchronous environment, Asynchronous Chess (AChess). AChess is a real-time competitive experiment platform for developing new agent technologies using single-agent reasoning and/or multi-agent cooperative strategies. We aim to provide a simplified asynchronous environment that is stochastic in its nature, but easily described from it...