McDonald, Paul

2014

One of the most widely studied forms of cooperative behaviour is the phenomenon of cooperative breeding, where 'helpers' care for young that are not their own (Cockburn 1998; Pacheco 'et al'. 2008). Cooperative systems are present in taxa as diverse as slime mould, eusocial insects and a broad-range of vertebrates, including mammals, fish, reptiles and birds (Queller and Strassmann 1998; Clutton-Brock 2002; Mehdiabadi 'et al'. 2006). Fittingly, a large body of research has been devoted to understanding the causes and consequences of cooperative interactions (e.g. Cockburn 1998; Lehmann and Keller 2006), stemming back to Darwin himself who pondered if eusociality might be a fatal flaw in his theory of natural selection (Darwin 1859). Interest in this research question has not been lost over time; a recent article (Nowak 'et al'. 2010) prompted a joint reply from no less than 137 authors (Abbot 'et al'. 2011)!

Emu - Austral Onithology, 114(2), p. 91-96

1448-5540

0158-4197

https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/15684

en

CSIRO Publishing

Cooperative breeding beyond kinship: why else do helpers help?

Journal Article

Publication