Modeling Social Behavior

The Puzzle of Monogamy

Cowbirds are monogamous, but as far as we know there is no parental care from males or females, and no obvious contribution from males to females outside of gene transfer. Given this, why are cowbirds monogamous?

I developed a agent based simulation to try to address this question. This code is available on github, and could be useful to you, but the question itself remains a puzzle. Sadly, I haven’t been able to work on everything simultaneously, but this is an area I’m excited to do more work in, so stay tuned.