Chapter 13 reading

Cooperative Behavior

Develops when individuals integrate activities to achieve a common goal increasing inclusive fitness.

Mutualism

Economic model where parties benefit by cooperating, leading to by-product mutualism and synergism.

Reciprocity

Donors incur costs benefiting recipients, expecting future reciprocation.

Recognition

Discrimination and identification of a target individual or group among similar non-targets.

Phenotype Matching

Mechanism identifying genetic similarity for recognition.

Recognition Tags

Associated with greenbeard models of cooperation, favoring identity signals.

Mate Recognition

Mechanism for recognizing conspecific members of the opposite sex.

Parental Investment

Time and energy devoted to offspring increasing survival but decreasing parent's ability to invest in future offspring.

Parent-Offspring Conflict

Disagreements between parents and offspring over the extent of parental care.

Group-Mate Recognition

Mechanisms depend on group size, stability, and the need to recognize specific individuals or classes within groups.

Group Signature System

Some species embed their individual signature system within a group signature system, where group labels are usually acquired signal features like learned acoustic signals or blended olfactory signals.

Appeasement Signals

Behavioral tactics and signals that maintain peace in groups are called appeasement signals.

Allogrooming

Allogrooming is the grooming or preening of another individual, serving multiple functions like hygiene, stress reduction, and as a commodity in a biological market.

Greeting Displays

Greeting ceremonies in communal species combine recognition signals, signals of approach with benign intentions, and expressions of mutual affiliation, reassurance, or assessment.

Democratic Decisions and Quorum Sensing

By pooling knowledge and information, democratic groups can make more accurate decisions than individuals, known as the wisdom of the crowd, and quorum sensing increases the probability of exhibiting similar behaviors.

Despotic Decisions

Conditions under which it might pay to follow a single despotic leader include significant errors in assessing the best timing and direction of travel, a large difference in experience or knowledge between the leader and other group members, and small group size.

Group Cohesion

In densely vegetated habitats, visual contact is quickly lost, and acoustic contact signals like repeated soft vocalizations are required for group cohesion.

Cooperative Breeding

Cooperative breeding is a social system where individuals care for offspring that are not their own, varying from egalitarian mutual care to highly skewed care by non-reproductive helpers in advanced eusocial insects.