"[C]ue-driven threshold cooperation may be a viable evolutionary strategy for microbes that cannot keep track of past behavior of their potential cooperating partners, in spatially viscous and in well-mixed environments alike.
2019 Behavioral heterogeneity in quorum sensing can stabilize social cooperation in microbial populations
Excerpts
" Microbial communities are susceptible to the public goods dilemma.
* Bacteria establish a cooperative system (quorum sensing) in a population, by coordinating their production of costly and shareable extracellular products ('public goods' in that microsociety. Be it a microfilm on an eelgrass stem)
Cooperators are vulnerable to being undermined QS-deficient defectors that escape from quorum cooperation but benefit from the cooperation of others. They have ways of blocking them, but mostly don't:
infact cooperators frequently coexist with defectors. "They form a relatively stable equilibrium during evolution. "
The Noncooperators bring innovation but in small enough doses
These individuals can gain an advantage within a group by using, but not sharing, the cost of producing, public goods.
Microorganisms have evolved several mechanisms to resist cheating invasion in the public goods game. The simplest one is "Conditional Defectors.
Conditional defectors represent a QS-inactive state of wild type (cooperator) individual and can invade QS-activated cooperators by adopting a cheating strategy, and then revert to cooperating when there are abundant nutrient supplies irrespective of the exploitation of QS-mutant defector."
"[T]he incorporation of conditional defection strategy into the framework of iterated public goods game with sound punishment mechanism can lead to the coexistence of cooperator, conditional defector, and defector in a rock-paper-scissors dynamics.
