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Conflict over reproduction in a cooperative mammal: an experimental approach

合作哺乳动物的繁殖冲突：一种实验方法

基本信息

批准号：
NE/E015441/1
负责人：
Michael Cant
金额：
$ 39.41万
依托单位：
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2008
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2008 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=NE%2FE015441%2F1
关键词：
Conflict over reproduction cooperative mammal

项目摘要

Animals that live in cooperative societies face inherent conflicts of interest which must be resolved in some way for the society to function. The most fundamental conflict concerns the distribution of reproduction. Animal societies vary enormously in the degree of 'reproductive skew', which measures the evenness with which reproduction is distributed among group members. A large number of evolutionary models have been proposed to account for why societies vary in this way. These models are based on different principles but nevertheless make similar or overlapping predictions, with the consequence that even the best attempts to test the models have up to now been uninformative. The best way to distinguish the models and provide a much richer understanding of reproductive conflict is to manipulate the degree of skew experimentally. We will carry out the first experiment of this kind large-scale on a free-living population of banded mongooses that we have studied for the last eleven years. This species is unusual because nearly all adult females (up to ten) in each group give birth together in the same den, and offspring are cared for by adults of both sexes. We have shown in a pilot study that we can use short-acting contraceptive injections to block pregnancy in breeding females for a single breeding attempt, thereby temporarily increasing the degree of skew while keeping group size and other variables constant. The behavioural responses to the manipulation, combined with genetic analyses of maternity, reproductive success and the kin structure of the group, will enable us to measure the costs of co-breeding, determine which individuals exert control over the distribution of reproduction, and provide information on the behavioural mechanisms employed in reproductive conflict. Moreover, our experiment will test for the first time the direction of causality between variation in the distribution of reproduction and variation in individual social behaviour, a important but untested assumption of models of skew and cooperation.

生活在合作社会中的动物面临着固有的利益冲突，必须以某种方式解决社会的功能。最根本的冲突涉及再生产的分配。动物社会在“生殖偏斜”的程度上有很大的差异，生殖偏斜衡量的是群体成员之间生殖分布的均匀性。人们提出了大量的进化模型来解释为什么社会会以这种方式变化。这些模型基于不同的原理，但却做出了相似或重叠的预测，其结果是，即使是最好的测试模型的尝试到目前为止也没有提供任何信息。区分这些模型并提供对生殖冲突更丰富的理解的最好方法是通过实验来操纵偏斜的程度。我们将在自由生活的带状猫鼬种群上进行这种大规模的第一次实验，我们已经研究了11年。这个物种是不寻常的，因为几乎所有的成年女性（最多10个）在每个群体中一起在同一个巢穴中分娩，后代由两性成年人照顾。我们在一项试点研究中表明，我们可以使用短效避孕药注射来阻止繁殖雌性的怀孕，从而暂时增加偏斜的程度，同时保持群体大小和其他变量不变。的行为反应的操纵，结合遗传分析的产妇，生殖成功和亲属结构的组，将使我们能够衡量的成本共同繁殖，确定哪些个人施加控制的分布的生殖，并提供信息的行为机制中采用的生殖冲突。此外，我们的实验将首次检验生殖分布变化与个体社会行为变化之间的因果关系，这是一个重要但未经检验的偏斜和合作模型假设。