Dr Matishalin Patel's Outputs (7)

The Animal-AI Environment: A virtual laboratory for comparative cognition and artificial intelligence research (2025)
Journal Article
Voudouris, K., Slater, B., Cheke, L. G., Schellaert, W., Hernández-Orallo, J., Halina, M., Patel, M., Alhas, I., Mecattaf, M. G., Burden, J., Holmes, J., Chaubey, N., Donnelly, N., & Crosby, M. (in press). The Animal-AI Environment: A virtual laboratory for comparative cognition and artificial intelligence research. Behavior research methods, 57(4), Article 107. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02616-3

The Animal-AI Environment is a unique game-based research platform designed to facilitate collaboration between the artificial intelligence and comparative cognition research communities. In this paper, we present the latest version of the Animal-AI... Read More about The Animal-AI Environment: A virtual laboratory for comparative cognition and artificial intelligence research.

The evolution of democratic peace in animal societies (2024)
Journal Article
Hunt, K. L., Patel, M., Croft, D. P., Franks, D. W., Green, P. A., Thompson, F. J., Johnstone, R. A., Cant, M. A., & Sankey, D. W. (2024). The evolution of democratic peace in animal societies. Nature communications, 15(1), Article 6583. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-50621-5

A major goal in evolutionary biology is to elucidate common principles that drive human and other animal societies to adopt either a warlike or peaceful nature. One proposed explanation for the variation in aggression between human societies is the d... Read More about The evolution of democratic peace in animal societies.

Microbial warfare and the evolution of symbiosis (2022)
Journal Article
Patel, M., & West, S. (2022). Microbial warfare and the evolution of symbiosis. Biology Letters, 18(12), Article 20220447. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2022.0447

Cooperative symbionts enable their hosts to exploit a diversity of environments. A low genetic diversity (high relatedness) between the symbionts within a host is thought to favour cooperation by reducing conflict within the host. However, hosts will... Read More about Microbial warfare and the evolution of symbiosis.

Visual odometry of Rhinecanthus aculeatus depends on the visual density of the environment (2022)
Journal Article
Karlsson, C., Willis, J., Patel, M., & de Perera, T. B. (2022). Visual odometry of Rhinecanthus aculeatus depends on the visual density of the environment. Communications Biology, 5(1), Article 1045. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-03925-5

Distance travelled is a crucial metric that underpins an animal’s ability to navigate in the short-range. While there is extensive research on how terrestrial animals measure travel distance, it is unknown how animals navigating in aquatic environmen... Read More about Visual odometry of Rhinecanthus aculeatus depends on the visual density of the environment.

Kin discrimination, negative relatedness, and how to distinguish between selfishness and spite (2020)
Journal Article
Patel, M., West, S. A., & Biernaskie, J. M. (2020). Kin discrimination, negative relatedness, and how to distinguish between selfishness and spite. Evolution Letters, 4(1), 65-72. https://doi.org/10.1002/evl3.150

Spiteful behaviors occur when an actor harms its own fitness to inflict harm on the fitness of others. Several papers have predicted that spite can be favored in sufficiently small populations, even when the harming behavior is directed indiscriminat... Read More about Kin discrimination, negative relatedness, and how to distinguish between selfishness and spite.

Uncovering the rules of microbial community invasions (2019)
Journal Article
Vila, J. C., Jones, M. L., Patel, M., Bell, T., & Rosindell, J. (2019). Uncovering the rules of microbial community invasions. Nature Ecology and Evolution, 3(8), 1162-1171. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0952-9

Understanding the ecological and evolutionary processes determining the outcome of biological invasions has been the subject of decades of research with most work focusing on macro-organisms. In the context of microbes, invasions remain poorly unders... Read More about Uncovering the rules of microbial community invasions.

Crystal toxins and the volunteer's dilemma in bacteria (2019)
Journal Article
Patel, M., Raymond, B., Bonsall, M. B., & West, S. A. (2019). Crystal toxins and the volunteer's dilemma in bacteria. Journal of evolutionary biology, 32(4), 310-319. https://doi.org/10.1111/jeb.13415

The growth and virulence of the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis depend on the production of Cry toxins, which are used to perforate the gut of its host. Successful invasion of the host relies on producing a threshold amount of toxin, after which ther... Read More about Crystal toxins and the volunteer's dilemma in bacteria.