Kinship reduces alloparental care in cooperative cichlids where helpers pay-to-stay

Zöttl, Markus; Heg, Dik; Chervet, Noémie; Taborsky, Michael

doi:10.1038/ncomms2344

Cited by 110 publications

(139 citation statements)

References 57 publications

(126 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

120

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Thus, it appears that in N. pulcher, the major function of subordinates' cooperation with dominants is the enhancement of their chances to survive and reproduce later, rather than direct or indirect fitness gains during their helper stage. A crucial component of this pattern is the pay-to-stay mechanism [50,51], by which subordinates trade help for access to shelters and protection provided by dominants [7,52]. An increased cost of membership in larger groups may thus explain the absence of positive fitness effects of large group size [39].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…due to improved survival chances when delaying reproduction) [1,5]. Several mechanisms by which direct fitness benefits may be reaped from cooperation have been proposed, including reciprocity [6], commodity trading [7], benefits from queuing for high-quality resources [8] and group augmentation [9]. A key aspect of direct benefits of cooperation in group-living animals is that group membership yields higher fitness than solitary life [9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

First- and second-order sociality determine survival and reproduction in cooperative cichlids

Jungwirth¹,

Taborsky²

2015

Proc. R. Soc. B.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cooperative breeders serve as a model to study the evolution of cooperation, where costs and benefits of helping are typically scrutinized at the level of group membership. However, cooperation is often observed in multi-level social organizations involving interactions among individuals at various levels. Here, we argue that a full understanding of the adaptive value of cooperation and the evolution of complex social organization requires identifying the effect of different levels of social organization on direct and indirect fitness components. Our long-term field data show that in the cooperatively breeding, colonial cichlid fish Neolamprologus pulcher, both large group size and high colony density significantly raised group persistence. Neither group size nor density affected survival at the individual level, but they had interactive effects on reproductive output; large group size raised productivity when local population density was low, whereas in contrast, small groups were more productive at high densities. Fitness estimates of individually marked fish revealed indirect fitness benefits associated with staying in large groups. Inclusive fitness, however, was not significantly affected by group size, because the direct fitness component was not increased in larger groups. Together, our findings highlight that the reproductive output of groups may be affected in opposite directions by different levels of sociality, and that complex forms of sociality and costly cooperation may evolve in the absence of large indirect fitness benefits and the influence of kin selection.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

First- and second-order sociality determine survival and reproduction in cooperative cichlids

Jungwirth¹,

Taborsky²

2015

Proc. R. Soc. B.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…B 371: 20150090 models support the hypothesis that generalized reciprocity can create evolutionarily stable levels of cooperation in a Prisoner's Dilemma situation by the simple decision rule of 'help anyone if helped by someone', and that following these rules need not be cognitively demanding [105,106]. Although empirical evidence for reciprocal cooperation in natural, non-captive settings still lags behind theory, recent studies on alloparental care have convincingly interpreted helping behaviour by non-relatives as a type of commodity trading-essentially, that helpers 'pay to stay' in the social group by providing cooperative services [57,59].…”

Section: (B) Reproduction By Subordinatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cheating and punishment in cooperative animal societies

Riehl

Frederickson

2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cheaters—genotypes that gain a selective advantage by taking the benefits of the social contributions of others while avoiding the costs of cooperating—are thought to pose a major threat to the evolutionary stability of cooperative societies. In order for cheaters to undermine cooperation, cheating must be an adaptive strategy: cheaters must have higher fitness than cooperators, and their behaviour must reduce the fitness of their cooperative partners. It is frequently suggested that cheating is not adaptive because cooperators have evolved mechanisms to punish these behaviours, thereby reducing the fitness of selfish individuals. However, a simpler hypothesis is that such societies arise precisely because cooperative strategies have been favoured over selfish ones—hence, behaviours that have been interpreted as ‘cheating’ may not actually result in increased fitness, even when they go unpunished. Here, we review the empirical evidence for cheating behaviours in animal societies, including cooperatively breeding vertebrates and social insects, and we ask whether such behaviours are primarily limited by punishment. Our review suggests that both cheating and punishment are probably rarer than often supposed. Uncooperative individuals typically have lower, not higher, fitness than cooperators; and when evidence suggests that cheating may be adaptive, it is often limited by frequency-dependent selection rather than by punishment. When apparently punitive behaviours do occur, it remains an open question whether they evolved in order to limit cheating, or whether they arose before the evolution of cooperation.

show abstract

“…A similar lack of kinship effect has also been demonstrated in three independent experiments of artificially formed groups of African cichlids, Neolamprologus pulcher (Stiver et al, 2005;Le Vin et al, 2011;Zöttl et al, 2013). All three studies compared groups of cichlids under laboratory conditions where helpers were either related or unrelated to an adult pair and showed that kinship was not related to the amount or type of help that subordinates performed.…”

Section: Monogamy and Kinshipmentioning

confidence: 57%

“…While these findings may appear to contradict kin selection based models, it is possible that related and unrelated helpers are provisioning help for different reasons. Le Vin et al (2011) Stiver et al (2005 and Zöttl et al (2013) all pointed out that related helpers may help their relatives in order to receive indirect genetic benefits while unrelated helpers may have to "pay to stay" (i.e., provide help to avoid eviction) in order to enjoy the direct fitness benefits of group living (see Quiñones et al, 2016 for a model based on this species showing that negotiations in a pay to stay scenario can result in higher levels of cooperation than relatedness). These studies highlight the importance of using experimental studies to demonstrate causality of effects described using observational data.…”

Section: Monogamy and Kinshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Right Tools for the Job: Cooperative Breeding Theory and an Evaluation of the Methodological Approaches to Understanding the Evolution and Maintenance of Sociality

et al. 2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Why do we observe so many examples in nature in which individuals routinely delay or completely forgo their own reproductive opportunities in order to join and remain within a group? Cooperative breeding theory provides a rich framework with which to study the factors that may influence the costs and benefits of remaining philopatric as a non-breeder. This is often viewed as an initial step in the development of costly helping behavior provided by non-breeding subordinates. Despite many excellent empirical studies testing key concepts of the theory, there is still debate regarding the relative importance of various evolutionary forces, suggesting that there may not be a general explanation but rather a dynamic and taxonomically varied combination of factors influencing the evolution and maintenance of sociality. Here, we explore two potential improvements in the study of sociality that could aid in the progress of this field. The first addresses the fact that empirical studies of social evolution are typically conducted using either comparative, observational or manipulative methodologies. Instead, we suggest a holistic approach, whereby observational and experimental studies are designed with the explicit view of advancing comparative analyses of sociality for the taxon, and in tandem, where comparative work informs targeted research effort on specific (usually understudied) species within the lineage. A second improvement relates to the broadening of tests of cooperative breeding theory to include taxa where subordinates do not necessarily provide active cooperation within the group. The original bias toward "helpful subordinates" arose from a focus on terrestrial taxa. However, recent consideration of other taxa, especially marine taxa, is slowly revealing that the theory can and should encompass a continuum of cooperative social systems, including those Hing et al.Methodological Approaches to Study Sociality where subordinates do not actively help. This review summarizes the major hypotheses of cooperative breeding theory, one of the dominant frameworks to examine social evolution, and highlights the potential benefits that a combined methodological approach and a broader application could provide to the study of sociality.

show abstract

Kinship reduces alloparental care in cooperative cichlids where helpers pay-to-stay

Cited by 110 publications

References 57 publications

First- and second-order sociality determine survival and reproduction in cooperative cichlids

First- and second-order sociality determine survival and reproduction in cooperative cichlids

Cheating and punishment in cooperative animal societies

The Right Tools for the Job: Cooperative Breeding Theory and an Evaluation of the Methodological Approaches to Understanding the Evolution and Maintenance of Sociality

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About