Sylvie Estrela, Eric Libby, Jeremy Van Cleve, Florence Débarre, Maxime Deforet, William R Harcombe, Jorge Peña, Sam P Brown, Michael E Hochberg
Author Information
Sylvie Estrela: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA; Microbial Sciences Institute, Yale University, West Haven, CT, USA; These authors contributed equally. Electronic address: sylvie.estrela@yale.edu.
Eric Libby: Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA; Department of Mathematics, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden; These authors contributed equally.
Jeremy Van Cleve: Department of Biology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA; These authors contributed equally.
Florence Débarre: Sorbonne Université, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) Université Paris 06, Université Paris Diderot, Université Paris-Est Créteil, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), Institute of Ecology and Environmental Sciences of Paris (iEES Paris), Paris, France.
Maxime Deforet: Laboratoire Jean Perrin, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France.
William R Harcombe: Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
Jorge Peña: Université Toulouse 1 Capitole, Toulouse, France; Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Toulouse, France.
Sam P Brown: School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.
Michael E Hochberg: Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA; Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Toulouse, France; Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution, CNRS Unité Mixte de Recherche 5554, University of Montpellier, Montpellier, France. Electronic address: mhochber@univ-montp2.fr.
By consuming and producing environmental resources, organisms inevitably change their habitats. The consequences of such environmental modifications can be detrimental or beneficial not only to the focal organism but also to other organisms sharing the same environment. Social evolution theory has been very influential in studying how social interactions mediated by public 'goods' or 'bads' evolve by emphasizing the role of spatial structure. The environmental dimensions driving these interactions, however, are typically abstracted away. We propose here a new, environment-mediated taxonomy of social behaviors where organisms are categorized by their production or consumption of environmental factors that can help or harm others in the environment. We discuss microbial examples of our classification and highlight the importance of environmental intermediates more generally.
