Chase Tag Championship and the Evolutionary Dynamics of Predator Prey Interaction

Playing chase is arguably one of the oldest in the game repertoire of human and non-human mammals. Chase Tag Championship is a sport event that has its roots in the parkour movement. Here, we see a fantastically beautiful demonstration of performance and human agility with fairly clear rules. Of course, biologically speaking there’s also a quite interesting story in terms of evolution of the predator-prey dynamics in the game. In the anatomy of a hunt researchers have shown that predators such as the cheetah rarely show their top performance in speed but heavily rely on acceleration and deceleration during a pursuit.

In most ambush predators such as the polar bears the predator gives everything it can in one explosive burst to catch the prey. Group hunters however take turns in their pursuit and the exhausted prey finally collapses. That is what wolves do when they pursue a prey like the bison which is much larger than they are. In chase tag matches we see a mix of both worlds. At the beginning of the match, the chaser and the evader both have fresh legs. However, if the evasion becomes successful, the evader will get pursued by a fresh chaser and therefore the dynamics mimics that of the group hunters.

The way the 12 m x 12m quad is designed also brings about the role of refugia especially important for the prey. In certain ecosystems like the intertidal zones, the distribution of places where a prey can escape from predators is crucial. Refugia can influence stable co-existence patterns of the predator and the prey. Here certain obstacles like “the mountain” or “the tilted cube” have high evasion quality and simulate refugia. A data visualization of individual player performance would be interesting to see in terms of predator-prey dynamics. Stats from close matches especially including wins by Sudden Death rule would be particularly informative.

When teams are rather unequal in terms of performance we may witness some embarrassing defeats such as the WTC5UK match between BCH vs FLD: