If it can be shown that this results from the control actions of distinct control systems within the cell body of a neuron then the definition is good enough. Likewise, if no one has discovered autonomous control systems interacting within the neural cell with this collective result (and that is the case) the example has no claim on the definition, and the definition is good enough.
Yes, that is the “single result”.
If you are in fact interested, you will read more than the abstract and look for examples and maybe data; if you are not, you won’t.
You have organisms of three kinds: forageable plants, foraging herbivores that eat from them, and predators that eat the herbivores.
Herbivore-induced plant volatiles (HIPVs) are volatile substances that plants produce when they are eaten and which diffuse widely in the air.
The blend of HIPVs is varied by the plant depending on
- current physiological status, including the degree of damage and its maturational stage
- ecological status, including what herbivores are eating them.
“In addition, high volatile chemical diffusivity enables multiple species inhabiting plants and the surrounding environment to share information …. These specific infochemical features allow HIPVs to act as multifunctional signals in a community, for example attracting … and repelling … herbivores, and attracting … and repelling … their natural enemies.”
Herbivores use these to control a number of variables:
- abundance of consumable plants
- nutritional quality of plants
- risk of predation.
For herbivores, it easier to find plants that have already suffered grazing (more HIPVs) but plant health and therefore nutritional quality suffers.
The same HIPVs are CVs of predators.
For predators, HIPVs from foraged plants are inputs to PIFs for prey, but prey in over-grazed places are less healthy and therefore nutritional quality suffers.
Their computational model accounts for the data “understood as combination of evolutionarily stable strategies (ESSs) of the herbivore and its natural enemy.” These strategies are examples of collective control. Given the animals involved, I would guess the peripheral and internal loop functions are genetically determined, but with the tremendous growth in understanding of plasticity and adaptation there is no longer an impervious conceptual wall between learning and evolution.
Reasonable, I think, to expect such strategies shaping vertebrate and mammalian predator-prey relations around the same HIPVs, and that pheromones of predators and prey may well also be involved.