Game theory and interspecific arms races

Conflicts of interests between signalers or between signalers and signal receivers are common in animals, and may lead to coevolutionary arms races. Natural selection favours victim adaptations that help victims resist exploiters, but such adaptations are likely to be met with counter-adaptations from the exploiters' side. In this project, signal recognition and signal evolution have been investigated in two contexts: aggressive mimicry, in which a predator or parasite uses mimicry to deceive its victim, and Batesian mimicry, in which palatable prey resemble defended or unprofitable prey to obtain protection from predation. Various mathematical modelling techniques suitable for analyzing evolutionary conflicts have been applied, including evolutionary gam e theory, signal detection theory, and kin selection techniques. The evolution of deceptive signals has been modeled for circumstances where the signal trait interferes with other functions of the deceptive signalers, and where signal