Benefits of Cooperative Breeding
There are many other possible explanations for cooperative breeding other than kin selection. Helping is not restricted to groups of closely related members, and it could also be a form of gaining parental experience, acquiring social status, “rent payment” for a shared habitat, or a gateway for future mating opportunities. Another primary explanation for cooperative breeding is group augmentation. In many species, survival is greater in large groups due to the benefits of large group numbers. Some species may experience passive benefits (actions that indirectly increase the fitness of an animal) due to the presence of other group members, such as the dilution effect, while others may experience active benefits (actions that are directed specifically to increase an animal’s fitness) that depend on the help that new members might offer. These benefits of cooperative breeding will occur in a population only if it is better to stay and help other individuals than to move somewhere else and attempt breeding. In this way, helping could evolve through group augmentation if the larger group sizes result in automatic passive benefits to all group members. However without passive benefits, larger groups could still receive active benefits in the form of delayed reciprocity. Therefore it might be advantageous for a subordinate to provide aid to a dominant individual even if it is completely unrelated.
Read more about this topic: Cooperative Breeding
Famous quotes containing the words benefits of, benefits, cooperative and/or breeding:
“It is too late in the century for women who have received the benefits of co-education in schools and colleges, and who bear their full share in the world’s work, not to care who make the laws, who expound and who administer them.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“While greedy good-doers, beneficent beasts of prey,
Swarm over their lives enforcing benefits ...”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Then we grow up to be Daddy. Domesticated men with undomesticated, frontier dreams. Suddenly life—or is it the children?—is not as cooperative as it ought to be. It’s tough to be in command of anything when a baby is crying or a ten-year-old is in despair. It’s tough to feel a sense of control when you’ve got to stop six times during the half-hour ride to Grandma’s.”
—Hugh O’Neill (20th century)
“The breeding we give young people is ordinarily but an additional self-love, by which we make them have a better opinion of themselves.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)