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Posts Tagged ‘kin selection’


Seychelles Warbler Cooperative Breeding

July 2nd, 2014 by Alyson

This is my added edit to the Seychelles Warbler wikipedia page. I added the section for Cooperative Breeding that can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seychelles_Warbler#Cooperative_Breeding_Habits

Cooperative Breeding

Seychelles Warblers demonstrate cooperative breeding, a reproductive system in which adult male and female helpers assist the parents in providing care and feeding the young. The helpers may also aid in territory defense, predator mobbing, nest building, and incubation (females only).[1] Breeding pairs with helpers have increased reproductive success and produced more offspring that survived per year than breeding pairs with the helpers removed.[2] Helpers only feed the young of their parents or close relatives and do not feed unrelated young. This is evidence for the kin-selected adaptation of providing food for the young. The indirect fitness benefits gained by helping close kin are greater than the direct fitness benefits gained as a breeder. This could be evidence for the kin-selected adaptation of providing food for the young.

On high-quality territories where there is more insect prey available, young birds were more likely to stay as helpers rather than moving to low-quality territories as breeders.[3] On low quality territories, having a helper is unfavorable because of increased resource competition. Females are more likely to become helpers[4], which may explain the adaptive sex ratio bias seen in the Seychelles warblers. On high quality territories, females produce 90% daughters; on low quality territories, they produce 80% sons. Clutch sex ratio is skewed towards daughters overall.[5] When females are moved to higher quality territories, they produce two eggs in a clutch instead of a single egg, with both eggs skewed towards the production of females. This change suggests that Seychelles Warblers may have pre-ovulation control of offspring sex ratio, although the exact mechanism is unknown. (more…)

Vampire Bat

May 14th, 2014 by amm18

 

The following includes an excerpt which was attached to the Wikipedia page “Vampire Bat” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_bat). The first and last sentence in this excerpt come directly from previous Wikipedia information and are used solely as a reference to identify what was added.

…This has been noted by many naturalists as an example of reciprocal altruism in nature.

It was previously thought that food sharing depended equally on relatedness and reciprocation.[i] However, it has recently been discovered that the predictive capacity of reciprocity surpasses that of relatedness.[ii] This finding suggests that vampire bats are capable of preferentially aiding their relatives, but that they may benefit more from forming reciprocal, cooperative relationships with relatives and non-relatives alike.[ii] Furthermore, a recent study demonstrated that donor bats were more likely to approach starving bats and initiate the food sharing. These findings contradict the harassment hypothesis—which claims that individuals share food in order to limit harassment by begging individuals.[ii] All considered, vampire bat research should be interpreted cautiously as much of the evidence is correlational and still requires further testing.[iii] For example, researchers question vampire bats’ ability to identify kin when past association, or interaction, is controlled.[iii] Similarly, scientists question if bats modify investments based on how other bats cooperate.[iii]

Another ability that some vampire bats possess is identifying and monitoring the positions of conspecifics (individuals of the same species) simply by antiphonal calling.[iv] Antiphonal calling is simply a song or verse sung in response.

Vampire bats also engage in social grooming…


[i] Wilkinson, G. S. (1984). “Reciprocal food sharing in the vampire bat”. Nature 308: 181-184. doi: 10.1038/308181a0

[ii] Carter, G. G., & Wilkinson, G. S. (2013). “Food sharing in vampire bats: reciprocal help predicts donations more than relatedness or harassment”. Proc R Soc B 280: 20122573. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2012.2573

[iii] Carter, G., & Wilkinson, G. (2013). “Does food sharing in vampire bats demonstrate reciprocity?”. Communicative and Integrative Biology  6(6): e25783. doi: 10.4161/cib.25783

[iv] Carter, G. G., Fenton, M. B., & Faure, P. A. (2009). “White-winged vampire bats (Diaemus youngi) exchange contact calls”. NRC Research Press 87: 604–608. doi: 10.1139/Z09-051