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Below are the findings in  "Alarm calls as a costly signals of antipredator vigilance: the watchful babbler game"  that were also confirmed by our data.

"greater pursuit cost to the predator will allow cheaper signals by the prey"

  • If stable oscillations can be categorized as a stable system then our model shows that with a higher cost of attacking when battlements are in place, the cost of building them becomes cheaper for the prey.
"stable signaling requires that prey that are less likely to be caught are none the less the ones willing to signal, because they consider themselves to be at greater risk"
  • Our model assumes the prey to have already seen the predator, it knows the predator exists.  Furthermore, our model uses battlements to simulate the cost of calling.  Given that when the potential of gain for the predator is less, and the cost of building battlements for the prey is less as well then stable states do indeed occur in our model.
Our initial belief when creating this model was that we would see what could be interpreted as "truth" by the prey. We thought that truth would be the prey using the call only when battlements had been built. However, as in human languages, communication signals are arbitrary, and being silent turned out to be just as good a method of communication as calling. In our predator prey interactions, there was no truth, so much as there was to parties actively communicating. The prey was constantly trying to "cheat" to get a little advantage but the predator would always adapt to this and the method of communication would change, but the communication itself is always happening.
Truth --- Code --- Results --- Discussion --- Downloads