We present two elaborations of the model of Broom and Ruxton that found evolutionarily stable kleptoparasitic strategies for foragers. These elaborations relax the assumption that the distribution of times required to handle discovered food items is exponential. These changes increase the...

We constructed a game theoretical model to predict optimal patterns of egg laying in systems where individuals lay in the nests of others as well as in their own nests. We show that decreasing the effect of position within an egg-laying sequence on the worth of an egg should lead to reduced...

Dominance hierarchies based on resource holding potential (RHP) or age are central to the social structure of many group-living animals. Nonhuman primate females and some other mammals are unusual because ranks can depend on kin support or follow an inverse age-graded pattern independent of kin....

Nestling brood parasites vary in the harm that they do to their companions in the nest. Here we use a game-theoretical model to attempt to account for this variation. Our model considers hosts that might routinely abandon single nestlings, regardless of whether they are host young or brood...

For foragers that exploit patchily distributed resources that are challenging to locate, detecting discoveries made by others with a view to joining them and sharing the patch may often be an attractive tactic, and such behavior has been observed across many taxa. If, as will commonly be true,...

We consider the optimal behavior of a cryptic prey individual as it is approached by a predator searching for prey. Although the predator has not yet discovered the prey, it has an increasing likelihood of doing so as it gets closer to the prey. Further, the closer the predator is to the prey...