Title:
Evolution selects for 'loners' that hang back from collective behavior—at least in slime molds
By:
Princeton University
Published:
Phys.org, 19 March 2020
From this article:
"It isn't easy being a loner—someone who resists the pull of the crowd, who marches to their own drummer.
But loners exist across the natural world, and they might just serve a purpose, said Corina Tarnita, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology."
To read this article:
https://phys.org/news/2020-03-evolution-loners-behaviorat-slime-molds.html
For more information, see scholarly article:
Rossine, F.W. [et al.]. (19 March 2020). Eco-evolutionary significance of “loners.” PLoS Biology, 18(3): e3000642.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000642
From the abstract:
Loners—individuals out of sync with a coordinated majority—occur frequently in nature. Are loners incidental byproducts of large-scale coordination attempts, or are they part of a mosaic of life-history strategies? Here, we provide empirical evidence of naturally occurring heritable variation in loner behavior in the model social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. We propose that Dictyostelium loners—cells that do not join the multicellular life stage—arise from a dynamic population-partitioning process, the result of each cell making a stochastic, signal-based decision.