and the strategies they might adopt to survive and reproduce. Evolutionary games are often given colourful names and cover stories which describe the general situation of a particular game. Representative games include hawk-dove, war of attrition, stag hunt, producer-scrounger, tragedy of the commons, and prisoner's dilemma. Strategies for these games include hawk, dove, bourgeois, prober, defector, assessor, and retaliator. The various strategies compete under the particular game's rules, and the mathematics are used to determine the results and behaviours. Hawk dove The first game that Maynard Smith analysed is the classic hawk dove game. It was conceived to analyse Lorenz and Tinbergen's problem, a contest over a shareable resource. The contestants can be either a hawk or a dove. These are two subtypes or morphs of one species with different strategies. The hawk first displays aggression, then escalates into a fight until it either wins or is injured (loses). The dove first displays aggression, but if faced with major escalation runs for safety. If not faced with such escalation, the dove attempts to share the resource. Given that the resource is given the value V, the damage from losing a fight is given cost C: If a hawk meets a dove, the hawk gets the full resource V If a hawk meets a hawk, half the time they win, half the time they lose, so the average outcome is then V/2 minus C/2 If a dove meets a hawk, the dove will back off and get nothing – 0 If a dove meets a dove, both share the resource and get V/2 The actual payoff, however, depends on the probability of meeting a hawk or dove, which in turn is a representation of the percentage of hawks and doves in the population when a particular contest takes place. That, in turn, is determined by the results of all of the previous contests. If the cost of losing C is greater than the value of winning V (the normal situation in the natural world) the mathematics ends in an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), a mix of the two strategies where the population of hawks is V/C. The population regresses to this equilibrium point if any new hawks or doves make a temporary perturbation in the population. The solution of the hawk dove game explains why most animal contests involve only ritual fighting behaviours in contests rather than outright battles. The result