Population dynamics whenever cooperators defectors, and loners compete to survive.

<p>The lines embedded with solid triangle, square, and circle represent the evolutionary trajectories of cooperators, defectors and loners, respectively. For , irrespective of the risk removal patterns, loners becomes the unique victor for the population starting with defectors accounting for the absolute majority. The abundance of loners or cooperators invariably leads to the establishment of cooperators in the inverse sigmoidally and linearly dependent patterns, while leads to the coexistence of cooperators and defectors in the sigmoidally-dependent pattern. Starting with the point of responding to the fraction of cooperators, defectors, and loners, the population navigates to extremely different equilibrium states under the three risk removal patterns. Parameters , . Upper row , middle row , and low row .