Indiscriminate Altruism in Cooperative Breeders

Question 1

What does kin theory suggest?

Answer 1

Altruistic behaviours increase fitness of altruists when the recipients are genetic relatives

Question 2

What are altruistic behaviours?

Answer 2

Behaviours that are costly to the altruist but increase the fitness of others

Question 3

Indiscriminate altruists vs kin-discriminate altruists

Answer 3

Indiscriminate:

• help group mates regardless of relatedness

Kin-discriminate:

• adjust amount of help provided according to their relatedness to the recipient

Question 4

How can animals kin-discriminate?

Answer 4

Need to be able to accurately recognise kind

Use cues:

• visual
• olfactory
• vocal
• associative

Question 5

What were the methods for this experiment?

Answer 5

Ran for 25 years

Groups were tagged and checked on multiple times a week

Four cooperative behaviours were looked at: babysitting, pup feeding, guarding and digging

Measured relatedness of altruist measured in many ways:

• mean relatedness to the litter (direct)
• mean relatedness to the group (indirect)
• relatedness to the dominant female (indirect)

Question 6

What did the results show?

Answer 6

Contributions of helpers were related to size of the group and these varied with their sex, age and condition

Contributions declined with increasing group size

Contributions differed between sexes with females helping more with babysitting and feeding whilst males helped more with guarding and digging

Mature individuals show more investment into babysitting and guarding

Heavier individuals contributed more to guarding and digging

No significant relationships between babysitting and amount the altruist is related to the pup, domiant or group (Figure 2)

Slight significance between dominant female relatedness and pup feeding - more feeding if dominant is full sibling

Question 7

What can be concluded from this paper?

Answer 7

Cooperation in meerkats is largely indiscriminante with respect to relatedness

Frequency of behaviours not associated with relatedness

Question 8

Improvements to the study?

Answer 8

As said in the paper, the model they used possibly caused artefacts from variables the model had not accounted for