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| Author(s): |
Luis Francisco Prado Pinheiro Ferreira Salles
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Biologia |
| Defense date: | 2021-11-30 |
| Examining board members: |
Marcus Aloizio Martinez de Aguiar;
Sabrina Borges Lino Araújo;
Carolina Reigada Montoya;
Mathias Mistretta Pires;
Gustavo Burin Ferreira
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| Advisor: | Flávia Maria Darcie Marquitti; Marcus Aloizio Martinez de Aguiar |
| Abstract | |
Understanding how cooperation among individuals evolved is a great question in Evolutionary Biology: when one individual cooperates with another, it raises the fitness of the latter by reducing its own. Still, cooperation is widespread in nature, and is also a major force driving the natural history and evolutionary trajectories of living organisms. In this project, we developed theoretical models to investigate the contributions of resource use, biological interactions and genetics to the evolution of cooperation and assembly and evolutionary history of communities. In chapter 1, we extended a previously published mathematical model to understand if cooperation might evolve in a scenario of interaction between two species with different competitive capacities and cooperative behavior. We show that interspecific interactions might be a fundamental selective pressure to the evolution of cooperation in such a scenario; and that adequate levels of cooperation between individuals of different populations are essential for maintaining sufficient levels of resources to the survival of these populations in an environment. In chapters 2 and 3, we use computer simulations to study the relation between species diversification, the structure of phylogenetic trees and the evolution of cooperation. In chapter 2, we focused on the analysis of diversity patterns and phenotypic composition of communities generated by our model. Although some cases simulated by the model are not able to predict the evolution of a community better than a model without natural selection, predictions regarding the evolution of cooperation are more realistic in it than in the one it was built upon. In chapter 3, we focused on studying the shape of phylogenetic trees of simulated communities. We show that the inclusion of selective pressure did not alter phylogenetic metrics significantly in comparison to a model without natural selection. Still, our model was able to predict, in many instances, the shape of empirical phylogenies, several of which comprised species with cooperative behavior (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 18/02769-3 - The influence of interspecific interactions on the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation |
| Grantee: | Luis Francisco Prado Pinheiro Ferreira Salles |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate |