Disgruntled employees resemble malnourished algae

Algae under threat become poisonous; Employees under threat become litigious
George ILIEV

(Photo: Algae, Wikipedia)

"When Gulf of Mexico algae do not get enough nutrients, they focus their remaining energy on becoming more and more poisonous to ensure their survival." The algae become two to seven times more toxic when experiencing a shortage of phosphorus, a major nutrient. This protects them from their predators - grazers such as zooplankton.

A similar mechanism is at play when employees feel their job is under threat. Such employees often become litigious in order to keep their job or to extract the maximum compensation.

What amoebas can teach us about leadership and free-riders

Presence of cheaters triggers cheater-resistance mechanisms
George ILIEV

One of my favourite science articles of all time, devoted to a humble amoeba species, has unparalleled implications for corporate leadership. It turns out that some amoebas evolve to free-ride on the self-sacrifice of other amoebas. In hard times the amoebas leading the migration of a colony die in order to create a stalk of dead cells on which the other amoebas can climb to get carried away by the wind to a better location. The free-rider amoebas go slower than the rest of the colony so that they would never find themselves in the self-sacrificial leading position.

Yet, eventually the free-rider amoebas get punished as evolution helps the self-sacrificing amoebas mutate and outcompete the free-riders. A small percentage of the "good amoebas" refuse to be pushed around by the free-riders and after multiple generations of reproduction the resistant strains of leader amoebas come to dominate. The researchers, who published their findings in Nature, conclude that "the presence of cheaters inevitably gives rise to cheater-resistant mutations".

In Amoeba World, Cheating Doesn't Pay

(Malachite amoeba illusion, The Hermitage, St Petersburg, 2012)