Cooperation in Animals

12 Key excerpts on "Cooperation in Animals"

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  An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology

  • Nicholas B. Davies, John R. Krebs, Stuart A. West(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  What is cooperation? A behaviour is cooperative if it provides a benefit to another individual (recipient) and has been selected for (at least partially) because of its beneficial effect on the recipient. The latter clause is added to exclude behaviours which merely provide a one-way by-product to others (West et al., 2007a). For example, when an elephant produces dung, this is beneficial to a dung beetle that comes along and uses that dung but it is not An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology, Fourth Edition. Nicholas B. Davies, John R. Krebs and Stuart A. West. © 2012 Nicholas B. Davies, John R. Krebs and Stuart A. West. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Photo © Andrew Young Cooperation 335 (a) (b) (c) (d) Fig. 12.1 Cooperation. (a) Cells of the algae Volvox carteri weismannia form cooperative spherical multicellular groups, which contain up to 8000 small somatic cells arranged at the periphery and a handful of much larger reproductive (germ) cells. This distinction between somatic and reproductive cells is analogous to that between workers and reproductives in the eusocial insects. Photo © Matthew Herron. (b) Banded mongooses (Mungos mungo) live in cooperative mixed sex groups of about 7–50 individuals across a large part of East, Southeast and South-Central Africa. Photo © Andrew Young. (c) An upside-down jellyfish (Cassiopea xamachana) infected with its algal symbiont (Symbiodinium microadriatum). The algae (orange in the photograph) provide the jellyfish with photosynthates in exchange for nitrogen and inorganic nutrients. Photo © Joel Sachs. (d) In social insects, such as this ant species Camponotus hurculeans, some individuals give up the chance to breed independently and instead raise the offspring of others. Photo © David Nash. useful to think of this as cooperation, as the elephant produces dung for purely selfish reasons (emptying waste).

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  An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology

  • Nicholas B. Davies, John R. Krebs, Stuart A. West(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Box 11.1 ).

  A behaviour is cooperative if it benefits another individual and has been selected for because of that benefit

  Cooperation can take many different forms in different organisms (Fig. 12.1 ). In cooperative breeding vertebrates, such as meerkats or Florida scrub jays, individuals often live in groups that include the dominant pair, which do most of the breeding, and the subordinates who help care for the young (Hatchwell, 2009; Clutton-Brock, 2009c). The subordinates can be either individuals who have not dispersed from their natal group, or immigrants who have joined a group. In birds, the subordinates are often termed ‘helpers at the nest’. Cooperative behaviours in vertebrates include feeding and protecting the young or other members of a group. Similar forms of help occur in some insect species, reaching their pinnacle in the eusocial insects (e.g. ants, bees, wasps and termites) where the subordinates become sterile workers and give up all chances of breeding independently.

  Fig. 12.1 Cooperation. (a) Cells of the algae Volvox carteri weismannia form cooperative spherical multicellular groups, which contain up to 8000 small somatic cells arranged at the periphery and a handful of much larger reproductive (germ) cells. This distinction between somatic and reproductive cells is analogous to that between workers and reproductives in the eusocial insects. Photo © Matthew Herron. (b) Banded mongooses (Mungos mungo ) live in cooperative mixed sex groups of about 7–50 individuals across a large part of East, Southeast and South-Central Africa. Photo © Andrew Young. (c) An upside-down jellyfish (Cassiopea xamachana ) infected with its algal symbiont (Symbiodinium microadriatum ). The algae (orange in the photograph) provide the jellyfish with photosynthates in exchange for nitrogen and inorganic nutrients. Photo © Joel Sachs. (d) In social insects, such as this ant species Camponotus hurculeans

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  A Natural History of Human Morality

  • Michael Tomasello(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Evolution of Cooperation And could this scarcity [of resources] not be alleviated by joint activities, then the domain of justice would extend only to the avoidance of mutually destructive conflicts, and not to the cooperative provision of mutual benefits. —DAVID GAUTHIER, MORALS BY AGREEMENT Sociality is not inevitable. Many organisms live, for all practical purposes, completely solitary lives. But many other organisms live socially, prototypically as they stay in close proximity to others of their kind to form social groups. The evolutionary function of this grouping is primarily protection against predation. Such “safety in numbers” sociality is sometimes called cooperation, as individuals aggregate with others relatively peacefully. But in more complex social species, cooperation may manifest in more active social interactions, such as altruistic helping and mutualistic collaboration. The increased proximity of social life brings with it increased competition for resources. In social species individuals must actively compete with one another on a daily basis for food and mates. This competition can even lead to physical aggression, which is potentially damaging to all involved, and thus to a system of dominance status in which individuals with lesser fighting ability simply allow those with greater fighting ability to have what they want. We thus have the two fundamental axes of animal sociality (Figure 2.1): a horizontal axis of cooperation based in individuals’ propensities (high or low) for affiliating with (or even collaborating with or helping) others of their kind, and a vertical axis of competition based in individuals’ power and dominance (high or low) in contesting resources

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  Mammal Societies

  • Tim Clutton-Brock(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Subordinates may sometimes be forced to cooperate by the coercive tactics of dominant individuals. Finally, apparently cooperative behaviour can be a consequence of individuals synchronising or coordinating purely selfish actions which generate coincidental benefits to others. Cooperation between female mammals takes many different forms, ranging from huddling to minimise heat loss (Arnold 1990) to complex strategies of alliance and counter-alliance (Whiten and Byrne 1988, 1997). This chapter describes different contexts in which group members cooperate with each other, while Chapter 17 examines the evolution of cooperative breeding. Section 9.2 describes nine different forms of cooperative behaviour that are common in social mammals; section 9.3 reviews evidence of ‘cheating’ strategies and tactics used to control cheating, while section 9.4 reviews the relative importance of different evolutionary mechanisms favouring cooperation and section 9.5 examines some of the consequences of cooperation between females. 9.2 Cooperation in Different Contexts Defence Against Predators In some social mammals, group members respond collectively to predators, jointly attacking animals much larger than themselves (see Chapter 2). Coordinated defence involving females occurs in several of the smaller social carnivores (Russell 1983; Rasa 1986, 1987a, 1987b; Rood 1986) as well as in cetaceans (Whitehead and Weilgart 2000) and in some herbivores, including musk ox (Mech 1970), eland (Kruuk 1972) and elephants (Dublin 1983; Moss 1988). Where multiple group members engage collectively in predator defence or collaborate to mob predators, it is often difficult to be sure that defence is designed to provide benefits to other individuals

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  Modeling Social Behavior

  Mathematical and Agent-Based Models of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolution

  • Paul E. Smaldino(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Cooperation 6 Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. —Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) C ooperation is everywhere. Your friend helps you move to a new apartment. A teacher spends her free time tutoring a struggling student. A group of hunters fan out to cir- cle their prey. Soldiers risk their lives to defend their nation. Aunts and uncles babysit their nieces and nephews. Friends and family share food, shelter, and stories. Cooperative behav- iors exemplified by these examples are foundational to the fabric of human existence. We are a cooperative species. Despite its apparent ubiquity, cooperation is a special thing. All the major transitions in the evolution of life on Earth have involved new cooperative structures (Maynard Smith and Szathmary, 1997). Multicellularity is possible only when individual cells limit their own reproductive success in support of the reproductive success of the whole organism. And yet, although the first single-celled organisms appeared on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago, it was not until almost 3 billion years later that the first multicellular animals evolved (Pennisi, 2018). We cannot take cooperation for granted. Sociality is possible only when individual organisms can limit ruthless competition and help one another. Indeed, cancer can be seen as a sort of backslide in which cells cease behaving cooperatively and act only in their own (short-term) reproductive interest. Overcoming the forces of pure competition is nontrivial, because evolution tends to favor strategies that allow individuals to outcompete their neighbors in the struggle for survival and reproduction. Among the most amazing examples of cooperative systems found in nature are symbolic communication systems, notably human language. Language is possible only when people can focus on a joint task for persistent coordination.

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  Cooperation and Conflict

  The Interaction of Opposites in Shaping Social Behavior

  • Walter Wilczynski, Sarah F. Brosnan(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  A smaller part focuses on a particular system, the marine cleaning mutualism involving the cleaner fish Labroides dimidiatus and its client reef fishes. This mutualism illustrates how conflicts of interest may yield a great diversity of strategies employed by partners to 185 tip payoff distributions in their own favor. Also, as this mutualism involves verte- brates, the cognitive and physiological mechanisms underlying interspecific social decision-making may be more readily compared to human and other primate social decision-making. What Is Mutualism, What Is Cooperation? As terminology differs both between and within disciplines, a proper understanding of any paper on social behavior warrants clear definitions. Key terms are summarized in Box 9.1. Following Lehmann and Keller (2006), “helping” can be defined as the general phenomenon that warrants an explanation: Why should a focal individual perform an act that increases the direct fitness of a recipient? In evolutionary biology, the first Box 9.1 Terminology Used in This Chapter Helping: A behavior that increases the direct fitness of the recipient. Importantly, the behavior has been selected for at least in part because of this benefit. Altruism: A helping behavior that increases the direct fitness of the recipient but reduces the direct fitness of the actor. Cooperation: An interaction or a series of interactions between conspecific individuals that yields, on average, direct fitness benefits to all participants. Mutualism: An interaction or a series of interactions between individuals belonging to different species that yields, on average, direct fitness benefits to all participants. By-product benefit: An individual performs an immediately self-serving action that benefits another individual as a by-product. Cheating/defecting: A behavior that increases the immediate payoff of the actor while reducing the immediate payoff of the recipient.

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  Wild Justice

  The Moral Lives of Animals

  • Marc Bekoff, Jessica Pierce(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Mutualism can also occur between animals of different species. A recent example comes from the work of Redouan Bshary and his col-leagues on cooperation between groupers and moray eels. The two spe-cies hunt together, and their combined hunting strategies are highly effective. The groupers swim to where the eels are resting in a crevice and begin to rapidly shake their head. The eels then emerge and they swim off together to hunt. Bshary’s team was able to show that the coopera-tion was not random, because the groupers actually signal to the eels to initiate a joint hunt. The researchers were also able to show that both eels and morays benefited from the exchange. Mutualism, then, consists of animals working together toward a common goal but doing what they would have done individually. There appears to be no conscious “choice” to cooperate, nor a complex calcula-tion of whether cooperation is “worth it.” Where there does seem to be some choice or calculation about the possibility of future benefits, the explanatory mechanism is not mutualism, but reciprocity. COOPERATION : 71 RECIPROCITY: YOU SCRATCH MY BACK AND I’LL SCRATCH YOURS The theory of reciprocal altruism was first proposed in 1971 by evolution-ary biologist Robert Trivers. Trivers hypothesized that an individual might cooperate with or help another individual if the favor is later paid back. I’ll scratch your back now, even though it is costly to me, with the expectation that you will scratch my back later. There is an important temporal element in the exchange when the payback is not immedi-ate, as it is in mutualism. This can be risky, of course, since the recipi-ent could decide to “cheat” and fail to repay the favor. Reciprocity thus requires a mechanism to deal with cheaters: there must be some way to detect cheaters and punish them appropriately.

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  Cooperation (Psychology Revivals)

  The basis of sociability

  • Michael Argyle(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Failure of social skill is the cause of many failures of cooperation, especially in social interaction and relationships. Social skill consists in influencing others, in acceptable ways, which usually means taking account of their needs, so working within this cooperative system. Non-cooperative behaviour might be labelled as ‘selfish’, but from our point of view more usefully as lack of social skill.

  Cooperation for external rewards

  As we have seen, most thinking about cooperation has taken this as the main reason for cooperation, and the dictionary definition assumes that this is what cooperation is. It is certainly not the only basis of cooperation, since biological survival requires several other kinds. Nevertheless, this is one of the essential ways in which more than one person is needed. It happens in the animal world: ants cooperate in an elaborate social system, with several different castes; flocks of birds collaborate to drive off a predator. It happens in all primitive societies – to catch a hippopotamus, build houses, fight other tribes.

  In the modern world there are many ways in which task cooperation for external rewards takes place. Industrial work could be seen as a large-scale kind of cooperation, though many workers do not share goals for the group, they are merely pursuing their own goals, working for wages and promotion. Nevertheless, they have aligned their goals and coordinated their activities sufficiently for a group product to be turned out, and this can therefore be regarded as cooperation, in the absence of shared group goals. A group goal can be created by offering a group bonus or incentive. It is found that the effectiveness of group incentive schemes falls off rapidly with size of group (see p. 120). Co-ownership, as in work cooperatives and communes are other cases of work cooperation (see pp. 81ff.). The most familiar case of joint ownership is, of course, the family. We shall look carefully at how far successful cooperatives, based on work or joint ownership, are possible on a larger scale than that of the family or small communes.

  Very often work requires cooperation between individuals in different roles, who have rather different goals. Supervisors and subordinates are an obvious case; we shall see later that effective leadership requires cooperative skills. Management-union negotiation is a case of conflicting goals; we shall see that the best outcomes here too are produced by a collaborative relationship using ‘integrative bargaining’.

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  Fish Cognition and Behavior

  • Culum Brown, Kevin Laland, Jens Krause(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 12 Cooperation and Cognition in Fishes Michael S. Alfieri and Lee A. Dugatkin 12.1 Introduction

  ‘The theory of evolution is based on the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest. Yet cooperation is common between members of the same species and even between members of different species’ (Axelrod & Hamilton 1981, p. 1390). In this simple, but powerful quote, Robert Axelrod (a professor of political science) and William Hamilton (a professor of evolutionary biology) illustrate a principal difficulty in understanding cooperation in light of evolutionary theory. Why should any organism help another at risk to oneself if there is no apparent benefit in doing so? This question has perplexed evolutionary biologists since the inception of the field. Indeed, Charles Darwin initially struggled to explain how sterile insects, individuals that sacrifice reproduction to contribute to the production of the hive or colony without gaining obvious benefits from their cooperative behaviours, could fit into his theory of natural selection (Darwin 1859). A key question regarding cooperative behaviours and natural selection faced Darwin, namely how could natural selection favour cooperation if the cooperation does not increase the fitness of those that express this trait? Darwin posited one possible solution a few paragraphs later when he noted that ‘this difficulty, though appearing insuperable, is lessened, or, as I believe, disappears, when it is remembered that selection may be applied to the family, as well as to the individual, and may thus gain the desired end’ (Darwin 1859, p. 237). Here Darwin described one of the main paths by which cooperation can arise and be maintained in a population, later described and formalised as kin selection or inclusive fitness by Hamilton (1964a, 1964b). In this chapter, we briefly describe kin selection, plus three other categories of cooperation, suggest the necessary cognitive prerequisites for cooperation to occur, and provide empirical examples that illustrate each category of cooperation in fishes.

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  Collective Animal Behavior

  • David J. T. Sumpter(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 10

  The Evolution of Co-operation

  A fundamental question about all forms of collective animal behavior is how they evolved through natural selection. At various points in this book I have turned to arguments based on individuals adopting or evolving behaviors that increase their own fitness to explain or make predictions about group behavior. For example, group size distribution was described in terms of individuals attempting to join a group of a size that maximizes their fitness (chapter 2 ); foraging birds were described as balancing searching for food themselves with copying others (chapter 3 ); consensus decision-making and synchronization were described in terms of individuals co-ordinating so they can benefit from acting together (chapters 4 and 7 ). While such functional arguments are not the only way to understand the behavior of groups (and indeed have played a secondary role to mechanistic explanations in the other chapters of this book), they are an essential part of biology. This chapter gives an overview of how functional reasoning can be applied to collective animal behavior.

  The theory of natural selection is grounded in the idea that those individuals exhibiting a behavior that provides them with higher than average fitness pass their genes, and thus their particular behavior, on to future generations. It is this idea that provides the basic assumption of evolutionary game theory models: those individuals adopting a strategy that provides them with higher than average fitness will increase in the population, while those with lower than average fitness will decrease. Despite the simplicity of this underlying assumption, these models have proved extremely powerful in predicting when co-operation between animals will evolve (Dugatkin & Reeve 1998; Maynard Smith 1982). As a result of this success, a vast literature has arisen on the evolution of co-operation, both theoretical and experimental. The size of this literature makes it difficult to give a concise account of how different models and experiments relate to one another. There is, however, an increasing consensus of how co-operation should be discussed in evolutionary biology (Clutton-Brock 2002; Foster et al. 2006; Lehmann & Keller 2006a, 2006b; West et al. 2007). In this chapter, I follow this consensus, and categorize how collective and co-operative behavior can evolve between non-relatives in four different ways: through parasitism, mutualism, synergism, and repeated interactions. In doing so I discuss evolutionary game theory, which has become a central modeling tool in understanding co-operation between non-relatives.

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  The Evolution of Social Behaviour

  • Michael Taborsky, Michael A. Cant, Jan Komdeur(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 141 4.1 Cooperation for Fitness Benefits A familiar example of mutualistic interaction is group hunting, where individuals join forces to detect, overcome, seize or defend prey against competitors to their mutual benefit (Packer & Ruttan 1988). Cooperative hunting is shown by many animals ranging from ants (Franks 1986; Duncan & Crewe 1994; Witte et al. 2010) and spiders (Ward & Enders 1985; Whitehouse & Lubin 2005) to fish (Partridge et al. 1983; Handegard et al. 2012; Herbert-Read et al. 2016), birds (Hector 1986; Bednarz 1988; McMahon & Evans 1992) and mammals (e.g. bats: Barak & Yomtov 1989; Dechmann et al. 2010; lions: Scheel & Packer 1991; Stander 1992; hyenas: Kruuk 1972; Drea & Carter 2009; wild dogs: Creel & Creel 1995; Rasmussen et al. 2008; dolphins: Gazda et al. 2005; Benoit- Bird & Whitlow 2009; chimpanzees: Boesch 1994, 2002; humans: Alvard & Nolin 2002; Bird et al. 2012). It is important to note, however, that an observation of cooperative hunting does not imply a mutualistic relationship per se (Bird et al. 2012). The crucial characteristic of mutualistic interactions is that the (behavioural) trait produced by an actor has itself positive fitness effects. These are usually enhanced by the partner(s) in the mutualistic interaction, but these positive fitness returns are not required for the trait to evolve due to its inherent positive benefit–cost balance. American white pelicans, for instance, often forage in groups and synchronize their bill dipping, which serves to herd prey (McMahon & Evans 1992). Capture rates and prey size are highest for individuals hunting in a coordinated fashion in a group, thereby benefitting each participant. This means that cooperation based on mutualism cannot be cheated – the trait itself is positively selected, even without return from others. This is in sharp contrast to interactions based on reciprocity, which will be outlined in detail below.

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  The Fractal Self

  Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

  • John L. Culliney, David Jones(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of Hawaii Press

    (Publisher)

  6 ◆ Social Order in Nature Between Conflict and Cooperation Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man. —Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex O n every level, the universe is mutable and contingent, and those prop-erties have woven themselves throughout time in the service of evolving patterns of matter and energy that we now try to measure and understand. Anyone reading this book is aware by now that a central theme is the interplay between cooperation and competition in univer-sal evolution, and we have argued from the beginning that cooperation has been responsible for generating ascendant complexity. We noted in chapter 4 that if there were “laws” of ecology, one of the fore-most would be that life evolves to avoid conflict whenever and wherever pos-sible. Of course, numerous exceptions occur among animals where direct conflict—for resources such as territory and food and, by males, for access to females—is observed. The greater the potential for a lethal outcome, however, the more likely that ritual posturing, aggressive display, and the like will evolve, in most cases, to resolve a dispute before actual fighting ensues. Many plants also compete aggressively, albeit slowly, for territory. Upward and spreading growth aboveground will tend to shade out competing individuals of the same or another species. Underground competition ensues by means of allelopathy: toxic secretions of some species’ roots deter the roots of others in a forest or grassland. Mostly, this results in wider spacing among various species in a long- term, evolved community, but certain invasive species may temporarily take over much of a mountainside by aggressive growth and allelopathy.

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