Biological markets in cooperative breeders: quantifying outside options.
Biological markets in cooperative breeders: quantifying outside options.
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DOI：
10.1098/rspb.2017.0904
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发表时间：
2017-06-14
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Field J
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Grinsted L;Field J
进化生物学的一个主要目标是理解合作社会中的利他性帮助和生殖分配，在这种社会中，从属的帮助者放弃繁殖以抚养优势繁殖者的后代。在这些社会中，传统的合作模式通常有一个关键的假设：留下来帮助的唯一选择是单独繁殖，这通常是一项不可行的任务。通过对纸黄蜂（Polistes dominula）的大规模野外实验，我们发现，个体有高质量的替代筑巢选择，这些选择提供的健康回报与它们实际选择的选择一样高，远远超过单独繁殖的回报。此外，如果通过实验将接合物移除，接合物就不容易被取代，这表明，对支配者来说，拒绝接合物可能代价高昂。我们的研究结果对合作个体的预期收益分布具有启示意义，并表明生物市场理论（包含合作伙伴选择和合作伙伴竞争）对于理解像P. dominula这样的社会中的帮助行为是必要的。传统模式很可能高估了留下来和提供帮助的动机，从而高估了提供帮助的数量，并可能低估了留住下属所需的生殖让步的大小。这些发现与广泛的社会群体之间分散的合作繁殖者有关。
A major aim in evolutionary biology is to understand altruistic help and reproductive partitioning in cooperative societies, where subordinate helpers forego reproduction to rear dominant breeders' offspring. Traditional models of cooperation in these societies typically make a key assumption: that the only alternative to staying and helping is solitary breeding, an often unfeasible task. Using large-scale field experiments on paper wasps (Polistes dominula), we show that individuals have high-quality alternative nesting options available that offer fitness payoffs just as high as their actual chosen options, far exceeding payoffs from solitary breeding. Furthermore, joiners could not easily be replaced if they were removed experimentally, suggesting that it may be costly for dominants to reject them. Our results have implications for expected payoff distributions for cooperating individuals, and suggest that biological market theory, which incorporates partner choice and competition for partners, is necessary to understand helping behaviour in societies like that of P. dominula. Traditional models are likely to overestimate the incentive to stay and help, and therefore the amount of help provided, and may underestimate the size of reproductive concession required to retain subordinates. These findings are relevant for a wide range of cooperative breeders where there is dispersal between social groups.