Cooperate or Cheat?

Using maths to study microbes might sound strange but these computer simulations could help to explain how bacteria grow and spread. In any population there’ll be co-operators – individuals that share their resources for the greater good of the group – as well as cheaters, who take more than their fair share. By testing out different scenarios based on how cheats (red) and co-operators (green) interact and move around, researchers can see what kinds of patterns emerge over time. In some cases, the cheats and co-operators end up segregating into separate areas (top), in others they mix (middle) and sometimes the co-operators win (bottom). Figuring out how these populations interact could shed light on how colonies of harmful antibiotic-resistant bacteria emerge and spread. More widely, the same equations apply to all kinds of species from bacteria all the way up to birds and animals, and perhaps our own human communities too.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image adapted from work by Felix Funk and Christoph Hauert
• Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Computational Biology, August 2019