Behavioral Strategy Chases Promote the Evolution of Prey Intelligence

Predator-prey coevolution is commonly thought to result in reciprocal arms races that produce increasingly extreme and complex traits. However, such directional change is not inevitable. Here, we provide evidence for a previously undemonstrated dynamic that we call strat-egy chases, wherein populations explore strategies with similar levels of complexity, but differing behaviorally. Indeed, in populations of evolving digital organisms, as prey evolved more effective predator-avoidance strate-gies, they explored a wider range of behavioral strategies in addition to exhibiting increased levels of behavioral complexity. Furthermore, coevolved prey became more adept in foraging, evidently through coopting compo-nents of explored sense-and-flee avoidance strategies into sense-and-retrieve foraging strategies. Specifically, we demonstrate that coevolution induced non-escalating exploration of behavioral space, corresponding with significant evolutionary advancements, including in-creasingly intelligent behavioral strategies