Sexual selection as a promoter of speciation has received much attention in recent years, but has produced highly equivocal evidence. Here, I test whether sexual conflict is related to species richness among genera in accipitrid birds of prey using phylogenetically controlled comparative analyses. Increased species richness was associated with both 'male-win' as well as 'female-win' situations,...

An agent-based model of population dynamics is presented. The model has as its expected behaviour the population dynamics of the equation-based Webworld model, within which large communities of species can be grown on evolutionary time scales. Such communities can be used in the agent-based model without disrupting the food web structure, and hence a unified model of evolutionary time and indiv...

Considerable progress has been made in understanding the evolutionary forces underlying animal group-living behavior. Even so, Krause and Ruxton (2002) identified optimal group size as an under-researched area characterized by unwieldy large-predator study systems and simulations based on group rather than individual decision-making. Therefore, we present a simple, flexible simulation of foragi...

The influence of predation in structuring ecological communities can be informed by examining the shape and magnitude of the functional response of predators towards prey. We derived functional responses of the ubiquitous intertidal amphipod Echinogammarus marinus towards one of its preferred prey species, the isopod Jaera nordmanni. First, we examined the form of the functional response where ...

Decision making is a vital component of human and animal behavior that involves selecting between alternative options and generating actions to implement the choices. Although decisions can be as simple as choosing a goal and then pursuing it, humans and animals usually have to make decisions in dynamic environments where the value and the availability of an option change unpredictably with tim...