25 Apr
2022
25 Apr
'22
10:20 a.m.
Dear BERGers,
Quick reminder that this Wednesday (27 April), Andre Pereira (Exeter University) will be
giving a seminar about his PhD project entitled "The evolution of kinship composition
in mammals". Please see the abstract, and the link to the meeting, below.
Please note that due to the faculty research day, the seminar will take place at 17:00
rather than 16:00.
Hope to see you on Wednesday!
Abstract
All else being equal, cooperating with kin results in overall larger inclusive fitness
benefits than with non-kin. Animals can live with kin, non-kin or both, and this kinship
composition can thus influence the benefits and costs of group-living and the evolution of
within-group cooperation. Yet, the kinship composition of mammalian groups remains
uncharacterised. We characterised the taxonomic representation and evolutionary trajectory
of kinship composition in mammals using pedigree data from the literature. We found that
the ancestors shared by the 18 species in our sample likely lived with kin for most of
their evolutionary history. However, we found that only roughly half of the 18 species
lived in groups where all same-sex individuals were related, whereas the other half lived
in groups where same-sex individuals featured kin and non-kin. Because it is not obvious
why individuals might live with non-kin, these results spurred two questions: 1) When
might group-members benefit from living with non-kin? 2) How might groups that feature
non-kin arise from groups that only feature related individuals? To answer the first
question, we used an analytical model to calculate the theoretical optimal kin to non-kin
ratio for a group according to the benefits that non-kin provide. Overall, we found that
living with some non-kin is beneficial when non-kin provide benefits that are larger than
the benefits from inclusive fitness of the potential kin they displace. For the second
question, we used agent-based models to simulate a scenario in which group-members might
need to increase group size and we explored under what conditions recruiting immigrant
non-kin is beneficial. Overall, our results indicated that recruiting unrelated immigrants
is beneficial when distance to optimal group size is large and most potential immigrants
are unrelated to group-members. Our findings indicate that living with a mixture of kin
and non-kin is not rare in mammals and that non-kin can be valuable group-members, further
highlighting the importance of considering both indirect and direct fitness benefits as
co-drivers of the evolution of sociality.
Link to the meeting:
https://teams.microsoft.com/dl/launcher/launcher.html?url=%2F_%23%2Fl%2Fmee…
Forthcoming seminars:
Date Time Speaker Affiliation Seminar title
27/04/2022 16:00 André Pereira University of Exeter The evolution of kinship
composition in mammals
04/05/2022 16:00 Laura Lewis Harvard University TBC, bonobo cognition
11/05/2022 16:00 Alexander Weiss University of Edinburgh TBC
18/05/2022 16:00 Eva Reindl Durham University TBC
25/05/2022 16:00 Shelley Culpepper University of Stirling Interspecific
Olfactory Perception of Human Emotions: From the Horses Perspective
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