Microorganisms communicate and cooperate to perform a wide range of multicellular
behaviours, such as dispersal, nutrient acquisition, biofilm formation and quorum sensing …

Our understanding of the social lives of microbes has been revolutionized over the past 20
years. It used to be assumed that bacteria and other microorganisms lived relatively …

The term “cheating” is used in the evolutionary and ecological literature to describe a wide
range of exploitative or deceitful traits. Although many find this a useful short hand, others …

Much of what we know about the evolution of altruism comes from animals. Here, we show
that studying a microbe has yielded unique insights, particularly in understanding how social …

The control of cheating is important for understanding major transitions in evolution, from the
simplest genes to the most complex societies. Cooperative systems can be ruined if …

Recognition of relatives is important in microbes because they perform many behaviors that
have costs to the actor while benefiting neighbors. Microbes cooperate for nourishment …

Cooperation has been studied extensively across the tree of life, from eusociality in insects
to social behavior in humans, but it is only recently that a social dimension has been …

The study of collective behaviour aims to understand how individual-level behaviours can
lead to complex group-level patterns. Collective behaviour has primarily been studied in …

In the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum, thousands of cells aggregate upon
starvation to form a multicellular fruiting body, and approximately 20% of them die to form a …

Social organisms that cooperate with some members of their own species, such as close
relatives, may fail to cooperate with other genotypes of the same species. Such …