What drives cooperative breeding?

Temporal Environmental Variability Drives the Evolution of Cooperative Breeding in Birds

Many vertebrates breed in cooperative groups in which more than two members provide care for young. Studies of cooperative breeding behavior within species have long highlighted the importance of environmental factors in mediating the paradox of why some such individuals delay independent breeding to help raise the offspring of others. In contrast, studies involving comparisons among species ha...

Avoiding Phylogenetic Bias

absence of viviparity or at least egg-retention in birds. And what drives research if not challenging mysteries? Moreover, the borderline between inventing adaptive stories and proposing hypotheses to generate testable predictions is not sharp. The book presents new ideas at the research frontier, which is one of its many merits. For instance, CluttonBrock argues that the potential reproductive...

Breeding for productivity and breeding for welfare: what is the relationship?

Spatiotemporal environmental variation, risk aversion, and the evolution of cooperative breeding as a bet-hedging strategy.

In cooperatively breeding systems in which some individuals delay reproduction to help raise others' offspring, environmental variation in space and time influences individual reproductive strategies as well as interspecific patterns of sociality. Although most environmental explanations for cooperative breeding emphasize the mean fitness gains of living socially, the fittest individuals are no...

Basic Principles of Response to Selection

When comparing different breeding programs the first question usually asked is "what are the expected responses to selection of the various plans". A considerable part of this course will focus on methods of designing breeding programs, which maximize response to selection. Although breeding plans are often quite complex, most can usually be understood in terms of a few simple principles of res...