What Drives Diversity in Social Recognition Mechanisms?

Abstract

Recognition allows animals to categorize social partners and differentiate among them in adaptive ways. Recognition systems are a fundamental component of social interactions, and a major goal for behavioral and evolutionary ecology is to understand the factors that influence the diversity of traits involved in social recognition across species and contexts. Here we argue that recognition is best understood as the interaction between a population of diverse senders and receivers with different perspectives and experiences. Receivers vary in the extent to which they agree on the category membership of senders and this variation is a key parameter that may explain the diverse evolutionary pressures shaping recognition systems. High receiver agreement (e.g., sex recognition) should favor uniformity in signals and innate recognition templates in receivers, while low receiver agreement (e.g., neighbor recognition) should tend to favor diversity in signals and flexible learning in receivers. Further, variation in how specifically receivers categorize senders may constrain the evolution of signals that need to function for multiple audiences. It remains an open question how receivers integrate multiple signals of different types of social categories. By framing recognition systems in a population context we hope this perspective will help spur new efforts to model and empirically investigate the mechanisms underlying the diversity of recognition systems across animals.

Color is necessary for specialized face learning in the Northern paper wasp, Polistes fuscatus

“…Individual recognition requires that animals discriminate among individuals within a population that share many features [1,2]. Reliably recognizing individuals of the same age-class and species, who tend to share many similar traits, poses a challenge for animals.…”

Ecological and social drivers of neighbor recognition and the dear enemy effect in a poison frog

“…There are now several known cases in which species within a clade differ in the degree to which they exhibit social recognition within the same behavioral contexts, such as nestmate recognition in wasps (Sheehan and Tibbetts 2010), parent-offspring recognition in birds (Beecher et al 1981;Medvin and Beecher 1986), and territorial neighbor recognition in frogs (Bee et al 2016). A current challenge to understanding patterns of diversity in recognition systems is identifying sources of selection that favor its evolution in some species but not others (Beecher 1991;Wiley 2013a;Tumulty and Sheehan 2020). Overcoming this challenge requires joint consideration of both ecological and social factors, because many relevant characteristics of social environments depend strongly on underlying variation in ecological factors, such as resource availability (e.g., Hatchwell and Komdeur 2000;Gaulin et al 2018).…”

Ecological and social drivers of neighbor recognition and the dear enemy effect in a poison frog

“…There are now several known cases in which species within a clade differ in the degree to which they exhibit social recognition within the same behavioral contexts, such as nestmate recognition in wasps (Sheehan and Tibbetts 2010), parent-offspring recognition in birds (Beecher et al 1981;Medvin and Beecher 1986), and territorial neighbor recognition in frogs . A current challenge to understanding patterns of diversity in recognition systems is identifying sources of selection that favor its evolution in some species but not others (Beecher 1991;Wiley 2013a;Tumulty and Sheehan 2020). Overcoming this challenge requires joint consideration of both ecological and social factors, because many relevant characteristics of social environments depend strongly on underlying variation in ecological factors, such as resource availability (e.g., Hatchwell and Komdeur 2000;Gaulin et al 2018).…”