Honest and cheating strategies in a simple model of aggressive communication: the role of spatial correlations

The evolution and maintenance of communication in terms of aggressive interactions is a long-debated issue. Several game theoretical models and individual based computer simulations investigated this problem in terms of a simple game of aggressive communication. So far all of these investigations focused on well mixed population of individuals. However, spatial correlations can emerge in nature where individuals or group of individuals defend resources. The extensive literature on cooperative games show that these spatial correlations can be vital in the maintenance and evolution of cooperative strategies, thus it is reasonable to expect that such correlations could play an important role in the evolution of honest communication as well. Here we investigate a traditional game of aggressive communication in a spatially explicit context. We investigate the role of spatial correlations by comparing results of evolvability in well mixed populations with results from spatially explicit populations. Spatial correlations seem to inhibit the evolution of communication in the spatially explicit version of this game. This result is unexpected, and it requires further investigation to understand.