The evolution of early-life effects on social behaviour-why should social adversity carry over to the future?

Numerous studies have shown that social adversity in early life can have long-lasting consequences for social behaviour in adulthood, consequences that may in turn be propagated to future generations. Given these intergenerational effects, it is puzzling why natural selection might favour such sensitivity to an individual's early social environment. To address this question, we model the evolution of social sensitivity in the development of helping behaviours, showing that natural selection indeed favours individuals whose tendency to help others is dependent on early-life social experience. In organisms with non-overlapping generations, we find that natural selection can favour positive social feedbacks, in which individuals who received more help in early life are also more likely to help others in adulthood, while individuals who received no early-life help develop low tendencies to help others later in life. This positive social sensitivity is favoured because of an intergenerational relatedness feedback: patches with many helpers tend to be more productive, leading to higher relatedness within the local group, which in turn favours higher levels of help in the next generation. In organisms with overlapping generations, this positive feedback is less likely to occur, and those who received more help may instead be less likely to help others (negative social feedback). We conclude that early-life social influences can lead to strong between-individual differences in helping behaviour, which can take different forms dependent on the life history in question. This article is part of the theme issue 'Developing differences: early-life effects and evolutionary medicine'

Statistical measures for defining an individual's degree of independence within state-dependent dynamic games

BACKGROUND: For organisms living or interacting in groups, the decision-making processes of an individual may be based upon aspects of both its own state and the states of other organisms around it. Much research has sought to determine how group decisions are made, and whether some individuals are more likely to influence these decisions than others. State-dependent modelling techniques are a powerful tool for exploring group decision-making processes, but analyses conducted so far have lacked methods for identifying how dependent an individual's actions are on the rest of the group. RESULTS: Here, we introduce and evaluate two easy-to-calculate statistics that quantify how dependent an individual's actions are upon the state of a co-player in a two-player state-dependent dynamic game. We discuss the merits of these statistics, and situations in which they would be useful. CONCLUSION: Our statistical measures provide a means of quantifying how independent an individual's actions are. They also allow researchers to quantify the output of state-dependent dynamic games, and quantitatively assess the predictions of these models

Evolution of menopause.

Johnstone and Cant introduce menopause and the phenomenon of an extended post-reproductive life found in humans and very few other mammals

Pairs of Fish Resolve Conflicts over Coordinated Movement by Taking Turns

SummaryWhen individuals stand to gain by interacting with one another, but disagree over their preferred course of collective action, coordination can be hard to achieve [1–4]. In previous work, we found that pairs of stickleback fish prefer to synchronize their trips out of cover to look for food [5], possibly because this reduces perceived predation risk [6]. To create a degree of conflict over group coordination, we trained individual fish to expect food at one of two alternative, exposed locations and paired individuals with different expectations. Compared with isolated individuals, members of a pair showed a significantly increased tendency to alternate between foraging sites, together taking turns to visit first one individual's favored site and then the other individual's. Using a Markov-chain model to infer the individual rules underlying their joint behavior, we found that fish respond to a partner that breaks the pattern of alternation by themselves reverting to less regular behavior. Our results confirm theoretical predictions that conflict over group coordination can be resolved by taking turns [7–10] and show that, in this system, the pattern of alternation is actively monitored and maintained

The emergence of leaders and followers in foraging pairs when the qualities of individuals differ.

BACKGROUND: Foraging in groups offers animals a number of advantages, such as increasing their likelihood of finding food or detecting and avoiding predators. In order for a group to remain together, there has to be some degree of coordination of behaviour and movement between its members (which may in some cases be initiated by a decision-making leader, and in other cases may emerge as an underlying property of the group). For example, behavioural synchronisation is a phenomenon where animals within a group initiate and then continue to conduct identical behaviours, and has been characterised for a wide range of species. We examine how a pair of animals should behave using a state-dependent approach, and ask what conditions are likely to lead to behavioural synchronisation occurring, and whether one of the individuals is more likely to act as a leader. RESULTS: The model we describe considers how the energetic gain, metabolic requirements and predation risks faced by the individuals affect measures of their energetic state and behaviour (such as the degree of behavioural synchronisation seen within the pair, and the value to an individual of knowing the energetic state of its colleague). We explore how predictable changes in these measures are in response to changes in physiological requirements and predation risk. We also consider how these measures should change when the members of the pair are not identical in their metabolic requirements or their susceptibility to predation. We find that many of the changes seen in these measures are complex, especially when asymmetries exist between the members of the pair. CONCLUSION: Analyses are presented that demonstrate that, although these general patterns are robust, care needs to be taken when considering the effects of individual differences, as the relationship between individual differences and the resulting qualitative changes in behaviour may be complex. We discuss how these results are related to experimental observations, and how the model and its predictions could be extended.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Editorial: Cooperation and Coordination in the Family

From Frontiers via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: collection 2020, received 2020-10-07, accepted 2020-11-06, epub 2020-12-07Publication status: Publishe

Turn-taking in cooperative offspring care: by-product of individual provisioning behavior or active response rule?

ABSTRACT: For individuals collaborating to rear offspring, effective organization of resource delivery is difficult because each carer benefits when the others provide a greater share of the total investment required. When investment is provided in discrete events, one possible solution is to adopt a turn-taking strategy whereby each individual reduces its contribution rate after investing, only increasing its rate again once another carer contributes. To test whether turn-taking occurs in a natural cooperative care system, here we use a continuous time Markov model to deduce the provisioning behavior of the chestnut-crowned babbler (Pomatostomus ruficeps), a cooperatively breeding Australian bird with variable number of carers. Our analysis suggests that turn-taking occurs across a range of group sizes (2-6), with individual birds being more likely to visit following other individuals than to make repeat visits. We show using a randomization test that some of this apparent turn-taking arises as a by-product of the distribution of individual inter-visit intervals ("passive" turn-taking) but that individuals also respond actively to the investment of others over and above this effect ("active" turn-taking). We conclude that turn-taking in babblers is a consequence of both their individual provisioning behavior and deliberate response rules, with the former effect arising through a minimum interval required to forage and travel to and from the nest. Our results reinforce the importance of considering fine-scale investment dynamics when studying parental care and suggest that behavioral rules such as turn-taking may be more common than previously thought. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: Caring for offspring is a crucial stage in the life histories of many animals and often involves conflict as each carer typically benefits when others contribute a greater share of the work required. One way to resolve this conflict is to monitor when other carers contribute and adopt a simple "turn-taking" rule to ensure fairness, but natural parental care has rarely been studied in sufficient detail to identify such rules. Our study investigates whether cooperatively breeding chestnut-crowned babblers "take turns" delivering food to offspring, and (if so) whether this a deliberate strategy or simply a by-product of independent care behavior. We find that babblers indeed take turns and conclude that part of the observed turn-taking is due to deliberate responsiveness, with the rest arising from the species' breeding ecology

The role of social attraction and its link with boldness in the collective movements of three-spined sticklebacks.

Social animals must time and coordinate their behaviour to ensure the benefits of grouping, resulting in collective movements and the potential emergence of leaders and followers. However, individuals often differ consistently from one another in how they cope with their environment, a phenomenon known as animal personality, which may affect how individuals use coordination rules and requiring them to compromise. Here we tracked the movements of pairs of three-spined sticklebacks, Gasterosteus aculeatus, separated by a transparent partition that allowed them to observe and interact with one another in a context containing cover. Individuals differed consistently in their tendency to approach their partner's compartment during collective movements. The strength of this social attraction was positively correlated with the behavioural coordination between members of a pair but was negatively correlated with an individual's tendency to lead. Social attraction may form part of a broader behavioural syndrome as it was predicted by the boldness of an individual, measured in isolation prior to the observation of pairs, and by the boldness of the partner. We found that bolder fish, and those paired with bolder partners, tended to approach their partner's compartment less closely. These findings provide important insights into the mechanisms that govern the dynamics and functioning of social groups and the emergence and maintenance of consistent behavioural differences.This study was supported by a BBSRC scholarship to J.W.J. and a fellowship from the Humboldt-Universit€at zu Berlin Postdoc Fellowship under the Excellence of Initiative to S.N.This is the final published version. It first appeared at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000334721400414X#

Evolutionary public health: introducing the concept.

The emerging discipline of evolutionary medicine is breaking new ground in understanding why people become ill. However, the value of evolutionary analyses of human physiology and behaviour is only beginning to be recognised in the field of public health. Core principles come from life history theory, which analyses the allocation of finite amounts of energy between four competing functions-maintenance, growth, reproduction, and defence. A central tenet of evolutionary theory is that organisms are selected to allocate energy and time to maximise reproductive success, rather than health or longevity. Ecological interactions that influence mortality risk, nutrient availability, and pathogen burden shape energy allocation strategies throughout the life course, thereby affecting diverse health outcomes. Public health interventions could improve their own effectiveness by incorporating an evolutionary perspective. In particular, evolutionary approaches offer new opportunities to address the complex challenges of global health, in which populations are differentially exposed to the metabolic consequences of poverty, high fertility, infectious diseases, and rapid changes in nutrition and lifestyle. The effect of specific interventions is predicted to depend on broader factors shaping life expectancy. Among the important tools in this approach are mathematical models, which can explore probable benefits and limitations of interventions in silico, before their implementation in human populations

Evolutionary public health: introducing the concept.

The emerging discipline of evolutionary medicine is breaking new ground in understanding why people become ill. However, the value of evolutionary analyses of human physiology and behaviour is only beginning to be recognised in the field of public health. Core principles come from life history theory, which analyses the allocation of finite amounts of energy between four competing functions-maintenance, growth, reproduction, and defence. A central tenet of evolutionary theory is that organisms are selected to allocate energy and time to maximise reproductive success, rather than health or longevity. Ecological interactions that influence mortality risk, nutrient availability, and pathogen burden shape energy allocation strategies throughout the life course, thereby affecting diverse health outcomes. Public health interventions could improve their own effectiveness by incorporating an evolutionary perspective. In particular, evolutionary approaches offer new opportunities to address the complex challenges of global health, in which populations are differentially exposed to the metabolic consequences of poverty, high fertility, infectious diseases, and rapid changes in nutrition and lifestyle. The effect of specific interventions is predicted to depend on broader factors shaping life expectancy. Among the important tools in this approach are mathematical models, which can explore probable benefits and limitations of interventions in silico, before their implementation in human populations