Influence of individual aggressiveness on the dynamics of competitive populations

Two populations are subdivided into two categories of individuals (hawks and lows). Individuals fight to have access to a resource which is necessary for their survival. Conflicts occur between individuals belonging to the same population and to different populations. We investigate the long term effects of the conflicts on the stability of the community. The model is a set of ODE's with four variables corresponding to hawk and dove individuals of the two populations. Two time scales are considered. A fast time scale is used to describe frequent encounters and fightings between individuals trying to monopolize the resource. A slow time scale is used for the demography and the long term effects of encounters. We use aggregation methods in order to reduce this model into a system of two ODE's only for the total densities of the two populations which is found to be a classical Lotka-Volterra competition model. We study different cases of proportions of hawks and doves in both populations on the global coexistence and the mutual exclusion of the two populations. Pure dove tactics in both populations are unstable. In cases of mixed hawk and dove in both populations, there is coexistence. Pure dove or mixed hawk-dove tactics in one population can coexist with pure hawks in the other one when the costs of fightings between hawks are large enough.