Climate attitudes are shaped by values, emotions, beliefs, and social context, but they may also reflect broader individual differences that influence behavior across domains. We examine how much variation in climate attitudes is associated with domain-general traits, focusing on economic preferences and control beliefs. In an exploratory online survey of 484 respondents in Hungary, we measured climate attitudes using the Climate Change Attitude Survey and distinguished climate beliefs from an action-oriented agency/intention component. We related these outcomes to delay discounting, risk-taking, altruism, cooperativeness, generalized trust, competitiveness, and locus of control. After adjusting for multiple testing, cooperativeness emerged as the most consistent correlate, remaining positively associated with the overall CCAS score and climate beliefs. Membership in the lowest delay-discounting category was also associated with stronger climate beliefs, while altruism was associated with the agency/intention component. The remaining traits, including risk-taking, generalized trust, competitiveness, and locus of control, showed weak or non-robust associations. Adding the domain-general measures to the sociodemographic controls increased R​2 by 4.2–5.5 percentage points, indicating modest incremental explanatory power. These findings point to the importance of combining domain-general individual-difference measures with climate-specific constructs such as perceived efficacy, institutional trust, social norms, and moral considerations.

Exploring the motivations behind collaboratively dishonest behaviour, is often done using dice-rolling experiments, where coordinated cheating increases participant pairs' earnings. Here we present a preregistered dice-rolling experiment that investigates how participants' dishonest (cheating) behaviour is influenced (i) by the dishonest (cheating) behaviour of their experimental partners and (ii) by by-product altruism (or cost-free charity) that is a direct consequence of a monetary reward in this experiment. We studied a 2 × 2 factorial design of the dice-rolling game, with the presence or absence of (i) a cheating partner and (ii) by-product altruism. Following the game, participants filled out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and the Social Dominance Orientation questionnaire. We found that without the opportunity of cost-free charity, cheating was not detectable, independent of the cheating behaviour of the partner. However, the opportunity of donating to a chosen charitable foundation (cost-free charity) significantly increased the level of cheating. We found that the relationship between the degree of dishonesty and the measured psychological traits is complex and, in some cases, contradictory. Our results do, however, confirm that participants with a stronger moral integrity were less likely to cheat. Our results showed that the level of collaborative cheating to obtain a monetary benefit is significantly increased by participants' perception of acting in a socially beneficial way as a by-product of their unethical behaviour.

Many ecosystems are undergoing simultaneous colonization and spread of multiple alien species. Invaders often negatively affect communities by reducing population sizes of resident species or even decreasing community diversity through extinctions. Direct and indirect interactions between them can amplify or mitigate their impacts on native communities. In this study, we compare the effects of two invaders on the resident model food webs under two scenarios: separate versus simultaneous invasion.We examined the resident food webs’ response from two perspectives: the number of extinct species as a measure of diversity loss, and the net change in total biomass of the food web. Using dynamic simulations based on the Allometric Bioenergetic Model, we tracked these changes in silico and compared the results of the two scenarios. We examined how the invaders’ relative trophic positions and their direct/indirect interactions influence the additive or non-additive nature of the outcomes of their co-invasion.Our results have corroborated previous field and experimental observations, showing that when co-occurring invaders occupy different trophic levels, their combined effects may be dampened if one invader preys on the other. Further, we have shown that the probability of synergistic effect increases when invaders form a trophic cascade or share a common predator. However, we have also shown that all these relationships are influenced by i) the metric used to track changes in the resident community, ii) the trophic level at which the invasion occurs, and iii) whether the invader has a predator (either resident or another invader).

Exploring the motivations behind fraudulent behaviours, such as corruption, are often done using dice-rolling experiments. In the present experiment, we investigated how the willingness for cheating is influenced by (i) the cheating behaviour of a partner and (ii) by-product altruism (cost-free charity). We studied four settings of the dice-rolling game, with and without a cheating partner and with and without by-product altruism. Following the game phase, subjects filled out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and the Social Dominance Orientation questionnaires. We found that while in the non-charity settings the cheating is not experienced independently of the chatting behaviour of the partner, but it is significantly increased by the possibility of donating to charitable foundations. Subjects with a stronger moral integrity were less likely to cheat in the cheating partner and charity option settings. No clear associations were found between cheating and Social Dominance Orientation. Our results showed that the chance of engaging in corrupt behaviour is significantly increased if the subjects perceive that they are doing a socially beneficial act as a by-product of their unethical behaviour.

Recent developments in data generation have opened up unprecedented insights into living systems. It has been recognized that integrating and characterizing temporal variation simultaneously across multiple scales, from specific molecular interactions to entire ecosystems, is crucial for uncovering biological mechanisms and understanding the emergence of complex phenotypes. With the increasing number of studies incorporating multi-omics data sampled over time, it has become clear that integrated approaches are pivotal for these efforts. However, standard data analytical practices in longitudinal multi-omics are still shaping up and many of the available methods have not yet been widely evaluated and adopted. To address this gap, we performed the first systematic literature review that comprehensively categorizes, compares, and evaluates computational methods for longitudinal multi-omics integration, with a particular emphasis on four categories of the studies: (i) host and host-associated microbiome studies, (ii) microbiome-free host studies, (iii) host-free microbiome studies, and (iv) methodological framework studies. Our review highlights current methodological trends, identifies widely used and high-performing frameworks, and assesses each method across performance, interpretability, and ease of use. We further organize these methods into thematic groups-such as statistical modeling, machine learning, dimensionality reduction, and latent factor approaches-to provide a clear roadmap for future research and application. This work offers a critical foundation for advancing integrative longitudinal data science and supporting reproducible, scalable analysis in this rapidly evolving field.

BACKGROUND:Quorum sensing (QS) is the ability of microorganisms to assess local clonal density by measuring the extracellular concentration of signal molecules that they produce and excrete. QS is also the only known way of bacterial communication that supports the coordination of within-clone cooperative actions requiring a certain threshold density of cooperating cells. Cooperation aided by QS communication is sensitive to cheating in two different ways: laggards may benefit from not investing in cooperation but enjoying the benefit provided by their cooperating neighbors, whereas Liars explicitly promise cooperation but fail to do so, thereby convincing potential cooperating neighbors to help them, for almost free. Given this double vulnerability to cheats, it is not trivial why QS-supported cooperation is so widespread among prokaryotes.RESULTS:We investigated the evolutionary dynamics of QS in populations of cooperators for whom the QS signal is an inevitable side effect of producing the public good itself (cue-based QS). Using spatially explicit agent-based lattice simulations of QS-aided threshold cooperation (whereby cooperation is effective only above a critical cumulative level of contributions) and three different (analytical and numerical) approximations of the lattice model, we explored the dynamics of QS-aided threshold cooperation under a feasible range of parameter values. We demonstrate three major advantages of cue-driven cooperation. First, laggards cannot wipe out cooperation under a wide range of reasonable environmental conditions, in spite of an unconstrained possibility to mutate to cheating; in fact, cooperators may even exclude laggards at high cooperation thresholds. Second, lying almost never pays off, if the signal is an inevitable byproduct (i.e., the cue) of cooperation; even very cheap fake signals are selected against. And thirdly, QS is most useful if local cooperator densities are the least predictable, i.e., if their lattice-wise mean is close to the cooperation threshold with a substantial variance.CONCLUSIONS:Comparing the results of the four different modeling approaches indicates that cue-driven threshold cooperation may be a viable evolutionary strategy for microbes that cannot keep track of past behavior of their potential cooperating partners, in spatially viscous and in well-mixed environments alike. Our model can be seen as a version of the famous greenbeard effect, where greenbeards coexist with defectors in a evolutionarily stable polymorphism. Such polymorphism is maintained by the condition-dependent trade-offs of signal production which are characteristic of cue-based QS.

The threshold public goods game is one of the best-known models of non-linear public goods dilemmas. Cooperators and defectors typically coexist in this game when the population is assumed to follow the so-called structured deme model. In this article, we develop a dynamical model of a general N-player game in which there is no deme structure: Individuals interact with randomly chosen neighbours and selection occurs between randomly chosen pairs of individuals. We show that in the deterministic limit, the dynamics in this model leads to the same replicator dynamics as in the structured deme model, i.e., coexistence of cooperators and defectors is typical in threshold public goods game even when the population is completely well mixed. We extend the model to study the effect of density dependence and density fluctuation on the dynamics. We show analytically and numerically that decreasing population density increases the equilibrium frequency of cooperators till the fixation of this strategy, but below a critical density cooperators abruptly disappear from the population. Our numerical investigations show that weak density fluctuations enhance cooperation, while strong fluctuations suppress it.

The origin and maintenance of sex differences in reproductive behavior (often labeled sex roles) have remained controversial topics, and recent meta-analyses and theoretical models have helped to elucidate the processes that generate diverse sex roles. We are glad to see that our study () generated a healthy debate, and in agreement with recent commentaries (; ) we call for a more comprehensive approach to understanding sex role evolution. Sexual selection and sex differences in reproduction have immense variation in nature, and Charles Darwin proposed this variation is driven by numerous factors that include the number of adult males and females in the population (termed adult sex ratio). Recent papers on sexual selection, sex roles and sex ratios confirm Darwin's proposition and suggest that sex differences may emerge in a variety of ways in nature. Here we clarify the rationale of our previous study (Mokos et al. 2021), and stand by our argument that to understand the rich variety of sexual behavior we need to incorporate ecological, demographic and life history processes into theoretical and empirical investigations.

Using different variants of the classic climate game, we investigate the role of competition and the source of endowment (windfall vs. earned). Participants completed a detailed personality test (including climate attitudes and economic preferences) before the experiment and were asked about their strategies afterwards. We find that competition did not significantly affect whether groups reached the target, even though the probability of achieving the common goal was lower in the presence of competition. Participants cooperated more when they had to earn the endowment. Based on the pre-experiment questionnaire, participants who viewed their personal actions as more important and effective in combating climate change were more likely to cooperate in the climate game, while the rest of the measured personality items did not exhibit a consistent pattern. Analysis of the post-experiment survey indicates that those who aimed to maximise earnings contributed less to the common pool. In contrast, those who believed the goal was achievable and aimed to achieve it contributed more to the common pool throughout the game.

While there has been considerable research on the interactions between invasive and native species, and on the impact of invasive species on the resident community, there has been less focus on exploring the relationship and interactions among invasive species themselves. Nevertheless, it is widely recognised that invasive species can have either positive or negative effects on each other, as well as neutral outcomes. In the present theoretical study, we compared the success of two invasive non-native species in two scenarios: when they invaded the resident food web separately and simultaneously. We examined the correlations between their direct and indirect ecological relationships and their topological positions in the food web, with the varying outcomes of joint invasion. Using the Allometric Bioenergetic Model (ABM) for dynamic simulations, we determined the success of invasion (presence or absence of invaders) and, in the case of successful co-invasion, the direction of their biomass change, comparing separate and simultaneous invasion scenarios. We studied the relationships between these variables after detailed numerical simulations with variable key parameters of the model.We found that direct and indirect ecological relationships between the two invaders can significantly modifiy the outcomes of the invasion scenarios. For example, their predator-prey relationship increases the probability of invasion success for both invaders, but at the same time the equilibrium biomass of at least one of them is likely to be reduced compared to its separate invasion. Trophic cascade or competitive relationship between them during simultaneous invasion also affects their success rate, with the former having a positive effect and the latter a negative one, as they can hinder each other's spread. Further, we found that higher trophic level and lower betweenness centralities of the invaders reduces the likelihood of invasion success regardless of the presence or absence of another invasive species. The results of the study can be tested experimentally in micro- and mesocosms.

Syntrophic cooperation among prokaryotes is ubiquitous and diverse. It relies on unilateral or mutual aid that may be both catalytic and metabolic in nature. Hypotheses of eukaryotic origins claim that mitochondrial endosymbiosis emerged from mutually beneficial syntrophy of archaeal and bacterial partners. However, there are no other examples of prokaryotic syntrophy leading to endosymbiosis. One potential reason is that when externalized products become public goods, they incite social conflict due to selfish mutants that may undermine any mutualistic interactions. To rigorously evaluate these arguments, here we construct a general mathematical framework of the ecology and evolution of different types of syntrophic partnerships. We do so both in a general microbial and in a eukaryogenetic context. Studying the case where partners cross-feed on each other's self-inhibiting waste, we show that cooperative partnerships will eventually dominate over selfish mutants. By contrast, systems where producers actively secrete enzymes that cross-facilitate their partners' resource consumption are not robust against cheaters over evolutionary time. We conclude that cross-facilitation is unlikely to provide an adequate syntrophic origin for endosymbiosis, but that cross-feeding mutualisms may indeed have played that role.

Cultural diversity and stability of a population affect the adaptiveness and survival of individuals. Besides field studies, cultural diversity and stability have been investigated with the help of different modeling approaches in relatively simple cultures. These theoretical studies helped identify mechanisms that generate cultural diversity through increasing the proportion of new elements in the population, for example by immigration or erroneous learning. Copy-the-majority learning strategies, forms of positive frequency-dependent learning, have a rather opposite effect: while they help in maintaining cultural stability by favoring the spread of common elements, they also decrease cultural diversity. We investigated whether these basic, conflicting mechanisms are sufficient together to create a complex, polymorphic cultural system and to maintain its diversity and stability. For that we developed an individual-based model simulating song learning in birds in which the extent of immigration, the frequency of learning mistakes and the strength of positive frequency-dependent learning were included as modifiable parameters. From the model, we obtained information on the composition and temporal changes in the individual and population repertoires. A comparison with long-term field data on a European passerine bird species with moderate song complexity, the collared flycatcher ( Ficedula albicollis ), was also performed. Our results confirmed that certain combinations of the three investigated mechanisms were indeed able to create patterns that showed certain aspects of polymorphic cultures. Yet, several discrepancies occurred when comparing the simulation results with the field data that emphasize the implementation of other mechanisms, especially those that have a stabilizing effect. Long-term metastable states, found in the population-level cultural diversity, raise awareness to animal cultures’ possible sensitivity to external factors.

The threshold public goods game is one of the best-known models of nonlinear public goods dilemmas. Cooperators and defectors typically coexist in this game when the population is assumed to follow the so-called structured deme model. In this paper we develop a dynamical model of a general N-player game in which there is no deme structure: individuals interact with randomly chosen neighbours and selection occurs between randomly chosen pairs of individuals. We show that in the deterministic limit the dynamics in this model leads to the same replicator dynamics as in the structured deme model, i.e. coexistence of cooperators and defectors is typical in threshold public goods game even when the population is completely well-mixed. We extend the model to study the effect of density dependence and density fluctuation on the dynamics. We show analytically and numerically that decreasing population density increases the equilibrium frequency of cooperators till the fixation of this strategy, but below a critical density cooperators abruptly disappear from the population. Our numerical investigations show that weak density fluctuations enhance cooperation, while strong fluctuations suppress it. Highlights The dynamics of threshold dilemma game in a well-mixed population. Fluctuation of density can help or suppress cooperation. Cooperation is more pronounced at lower density. Cooperation abruptly disappears below a critical density level.

Maintaining a good reputation is crucial for humans. Altruism, e.g. charity, may serve as a costly signal that enhances reputation based on the real or communicated cost. Fundraising via charity running triggers competitive altruism when potential donors donate in reaction to the reputation increase of the fundraiser. Using real-life data of marathonists and half-marathonists (388 runners) and their 9281 donors, the present research focuses on how the communicated cost and goal of a charity run affected the potential donors. We analysed the introductory texts of the runners presented online according to the cost and the social benefit of the fundraising communicated by them. We have shown that emphasizing more the subjective cost of running and the social benefit of the goal, or writing a longer text, attracted more donors and, even though the average amount of donation per donor did not increase, still lead to a greater amount of donations collected overall by the fundraiser. It was also shown that a higher communicated subjective cost resulted in a higher ratio of opposite-sex donors, both in the case of male and female runners, suggesting that the communication of the cost of an altruistic act might be the object of sexual selection. Significance statement A good reputation is crucial for humans, as a reputable person enjoys several benefits. One way to maintain a good reputation is to be altruistic, e.g. doing charity. A seemingly high cost and a socially accepted goal may result in a higher reputation. Using data from a charity running community we demonstrate that fundraisers who emphasize their subjective cost (how difficult to run), and emphasize the good goal of the charity, attract more donors, and even though the average amount of each donation does not increase, a higher number of donors results in a greater amount of donations collected overall. Talking about the difficulties of the charity run results in a higher ratio of opposite-sex donors. Our results may be helpful to plan more successful charity events or to make a human community more altruistic and cooperative in general.

Public Goods Games (PGGs) are n-person games with dependence of individual fitness benefits on the collective investment by the players. We have studied a simple PGG scenario played out by cooperating (C) and defecting (D) agents, applying the highly nonlinear threshold benefit function in an individual-based lattice model. A semi-analytical approximation of the lattice model has been developed and shown to describe the dynamics fairly well in the vicinity of the steady state. Besides the expected outcomes (i.e., the negative effect on cooperator persistence of higher cooperation costs and/or more intensive mixing of the population) we have found a surprising, counter-intuitive effect of the strength of selection on the steady state of the model. The effect is different at low and high cooperation costs, and it shows up only in the lattice model, suggesting that stochastic effects and higher order spatial correlations due to the emergent spatial clustering of cooperators (not taken into account in the semi-analytical approximation) must be responsible for the unexpected results for which we propose an intuitive explanation, present a tentative demonstration, and shortly discuss their biological relevance.

The emergence of animal societies offers unsolved problems for both evolutionary and ecological studies. Social spiders are especially well suited to address this problem given their multiple independent origins and distinct geographic distribution. On the basis of long-term research on the spider genus Anelosimus, we developed a spatial model that re-creates observed macroecological patterns in the distribution of social and subsocial spiders. We show that parallel gradients of increasing insect size and disturbance (rain, predation) with proximity to the lowland tropical rain forest would explain why social species are concentrated in the lowland wet tropics but absent from higher elevations and latitudes. The model further shows that disturbance, which disproportionately affects small colonies, not only creates conditions that require group living but also tempers the dynamics of large social groups. Similarly simple underlying processes, albeit with different players on a somewhat different stage, may explain the diversity of other social systems.

Microbiomes provide key ecological functions to their host; however, most host-associated microbiomes are too complicated to allow a model of essential host–microbe–microbe interactions. The intestinal microbiota of salmonids may offer a solution since few dominating species often characterize it. Healthy fish coexist with a mutualistic Mycoplasma sp. species, while stress allows the spread of pathogenic strains, such as Aliivibrio sp. Even after a skin infection, the Mycoplasma does not recover; Aliivibrio sp. often remains the dominant species, or Mycoplasma–Aliivibrio coexistence was occasionally observed. We devised a model involving interactions among the host immune system, Mycoplasma sp. plus a toxin-producing pathogen. Our model embraces a complete microbiota community and is in harmony with experimental results that host–Mycoplasma mutualism prevents the spread of pathogens. Contrary, stress suppresses the host immune system allowing dominance of pathogens, and Mycoplasma does not recover after stress disappears.

A better understanding of how the COVID-19 epidemic responds to social distancing efforts is required for the control of future outbreaks and to calibrate partial lock-downs. We present quantitative relationships between key parameters characterizing the COVID-19 epidemiology and social distancing efforts of nine selected European countries. Epidemiological parameters were extracted from the number of daily deaths data, while mitigation efforts are estimated from mobile phone tracking data. The decrease of the basic reproductive number ( R 0 ) as well as the duration of the initial exponential expansion phase of the epidemic strongly correlates with the magnitude of mobility reduction. Utilizing these relationships we decipher the relative impact of the timing and the extent of social distancing on the total death burden of the epidemic.

Males and females often display different behaviours and, in the context of reproduction, these behaviours are labelled sex roles. The Darwin-Bateman paradigm argues that the root of these differences is anisogamy (i.e., differences in size and/or function of gametes between the sexes) that leads to biased sexual selection, and sex differences in parental care and body size. This evolutionary cascade, however, is contentious since some of the underpinning assumptions have been questioned. Here we investigate the relationships between anisogamy, sexual size dimorphism, sex difference in parental care and intensity of sexual selection using phylogenetic comparative analyses of 64 species from a wide range of animal taxa. The results question the first step of the Darwin-Bateman paradigm, as the extent of anisogamy does not appear to predict the intensity of sexual selection. The only significant predictor of sexual selection is the relative inputs of males and females into the care of offspring. We propose that ecological factors, life-history and demography have more substantial impacts on contemporary sex roles than the differences of gametic investments between the sexes.

Microorganisms produce materials leaked from the cell which are beneficial for themselves and their neighbors. We modeled the situation when cells can produce different costly secretions which increase the carrying capacity of the population. Strains that lose the function of producing one or more secretions avoid the cost of production and can exhaust the producers. However, secreting substances provides a private benefit for the producers in a density-dependent way. We developed a model to examine the outcome of the selection among different type of producer strains from the non-producer strain to the partial producers, to the full producer one. We were particularly interested in circumstances under which selection maintains partners that produce complementary secreted materials thus forming an interdependent mutualistic interaction. We show that interdependent mutualism is selected under broad range of conditions if private benefit decreases with density. Selection frequently causes the coexistence of more and less generalist cooperative strains, thus cooperation and exploitation co-occur. Interdependent mutual-ism is evolved under more specific circumstances if private benefit increases with density and these general observations are valid in a well-mixed and in a structured deme model. We show that the applied population structure supports cooperation in general, which, depending on the level of private benefit and intensity of mixing helps either the specialist or the generalist cooperators.