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...

R.A. Adams and S.C. Pedersen (eds.), Bat Evolution, Ecology, and Conservation, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-7397-8_12, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract To be evolutionarily stable, cooperative behavior must increase the actor’s lifetime direct fi tness (mutualism) or indirect fi tness (altruism), even in the presence of exploitative, noncooperative “cheaters.” Cooperators can ...