Lower visibility of female scientists, compared to male scientists, is a potential reason for the under‐representation of women among senior academic ranks. Visibility in the scientific community stems partly from presenting research as an invited speaker at organized meetings. We analysed the sex ratio of presenters at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) Congress 2011, where all abstract submissions were accepted for presentation. Women were under‐represented among invited speakers at symposia (15% women) compared to all presenters (46%), regular oral presenters (41%) and plenary speakers (25%). At the ESEB congresses in 2001–2011, 9–23% of invited speakers were women. This under‐representation of women is partly attributable to a larger proportion of women, than men, declining invitations: in 2011, 50% of women declined an invitation to speak compared to 26% of men. We expect invited speakers to be scientists from top ranked institutions or authors of recent papers in high‐impact journals. Considering all invited speakers (including declined invitations), 23% were women. This was lower than the baseline sex ratios of early‐mid career stage scientists, but was similar to senior scientists and authors that have published in high‐impact journals. High‐quality science by women therefore has low exposure at international meetings, which will constrain Evolutionary Biology from reaching its full potential. We wish to highlight the wider implications of turning down invitations to speak, and encourage conference organizers to implement steps to increase acceptance rates of invited talks.

Theoretical research on evolutionary aspects of territoriality has a long history. Existing studies, however, differ widely in modelling approach and research question. A generalized view on the evolution of territoriality is accordingly still missing. In this review, we show that territorial conflicts can be classified into qualitatively distinct types according to what mode of access to a territory which competitor attempts to gain. We argue that many of the inconsistencies between existing studies can be traced back to the fact that, while using the same terminology, different instances of these types of conflicts have been investigated. We discuss the connections of each type of conflict to existing research within the wider area of animal conflicts. We conclude that a clear conceptual separation of different types of territorial conflicts is helpful but that a more general theory of territoriality has to account for interdependencies between them and that a more mechanistic approach to modelling territoriality is needed.

Models of resource defense are usually based on the assumption that individuals fight over the possession of discrete food items. In many territorial species, however, conflicts occur over access to an area in space that contains resources rather than the resources themselves. We investigate under which conditions defense against depletion of local resources instead of single resource items can evolve from a nonaggressive ancestral population using a spatially explicit mechanistic model with resource dynamics and individual movement. We find that, in general, details of the model assumptions have a great influence on the costs and benefits of different behavior in the model. For patchy resources, defense evolves if fighting costs are very high or if individuals cannot unilaterally opt out of conflicts. If resources are distributed uniformly, defense appears only if individuals can make their behavior dependent on distance to their opponent. Introducing role asymmetries during conflicts in general increases the frequency of contests but reduces the probability that they escalate. If losers of a fight control how far they run, aggressiveness disappears or is greatly reduced for patchy resources but increases significantly for uniform resource distribution. Our results show how defense of space and territoriality could evolve even if resources are neither discrete nor clumped. The fact that seemingly minor differences in how individuals make decisions during encounters lead to huge differences in model outcome highlights the need for more mechanistic models of animal conflicts.

Most models of migration simply assume that migrants somehow make their way from their point of origin to their chosen destination. We know, however, that—especially in the case of asylum migration—the migrant journey often is a hazardous, difficult process where migrants make decisions based on limited information and under severe material constraints. Here we investigate the dynamics of the migration journey itself using a spatially explicit, agent-based model. In particular we are interested in the effects of limited information and information exchange. We find that under limited information, migration routes generally become suboptimal, their stochasticity increases, and migrants arrive much less frequently at their preferred destination. Under specific circumstances, self-organised consensus routes emerge that are largely unpredictable. Limited information also strongly reduces the migrants’ ability to react to changes in circumstances. We conclude, first, that information and information exchange is likely to have considerable effects on all aspects of migration and should thus be included in future modelling efforts and, second, that there are many questions in theoretical migration research that are likely to profit from the use of agent-based modelling techniques.