Hawk-dove game and competition dynamics

Abstract

In this article, we consider two populations subdivided into two categories of individuals (hawks and doves). Individuals fight to have access to a resource necessary for their growth. Conflicts occur between hawks of the same population and hawks of different populations. The aim of this work is to investigate the long term effects of these conflicts on coexistence and stability of the community of the two populations. This model involves four variables corresponding to the two tactics of individuals of the two populations. The model is composed of two parts, a fast part describing the encounters and fights, and the slow part describing the long term effects of encounters on the growth of the populations. We use aggregation methods allowing us to reduce this model into a system of two ODEs for the total densities of the two populations. This is found to be a classical Lotka-Volterra competition model. We study the effects of the different fast equilibrium proportions of hawks and doves in both populations on the global coexistence and the mutual exclusion of the two populations. We show that in some cases, mixed hawk and dove populations coexist. Aggressive populations of hawks exclude doves except in the case of interpopulation costs being smaller than intrapopulation ones.