Switching spatial scale reveals dominance-dependent social foraging tactics in a wild primate.

When foraging in a social group, individuals are faced with the choice of sampling their environment directly or exploiting the discoveries of others. The evolutionary dynamics of this trade-off have been explored mathematically through the producer-scrounger game, which has highlighted socially exploitative behaviours as a major potential cost of group living. However, our understanding of the tight interplay that can exist between social dominance and scrounging behaviour is limited.

Information use and resource competition: an integrative framework.

Organisms may reduce uncertainty regarding how best to exploit their environment by collecting information about resource distribution. We develop a model to demonstrate how competition can facilitate or constrain an individual's ability to use information when acquiring resources. As resource distribution underpins both selection on information use and the strength and nature of competition between individuals, we demonstrate interdependencies between the two that should be common in nature.

Phenotypic assortment in wild primate networks: implications for the dissemination of information.

Individuals' access to social information can depend on their social network. Homophily-a preference to associate with similar phenotypes-may cause assortment within social networks that could preclude information transfer from individuals who generate information to those who would benefit from acquiring it. Thus, understanding phenotypic assortment may lead to a greater understanding of the factors that could limit the transfer of information between individuals.

Bacterial recombination promotes the evolution of multi-drug-resistance in functionally diverse populations.

Bacterial recombination is believed to be a major factor explaining the prevalence of multi-drug-resistance (MDR) among pathogenic bacteria. Despite extensive evidence for exchange of resistance genes from retrospective sequence analyses, experimental evidence for the evolutionary benefits of bacterial recombination is scarce. We compared the evolution of MDR between populations of Acinetobacter baylyi in which we manipulated both the recombination rate and the initial diversity of strains with resistance to single drugs.