Group Living

kin selection and closer relatives are benefited the most. Other kin discrimination factors include certain odors or certain phenotypes visible to relatives. Kin discrimination can be bad if it decreases the genetic variability in the population.

Kin selection tends to keep populations close together so that relatives are near one another. This means that it would be less necessary to have kin discrimination because helping one s neighbors is likely to be the same thing as helping one s relatives. Neighbors are also likely to be relatives. Limited dispersal of organisms will usually favor cooperation but this isn t necessarily the case. This would be less likely to lead to cooperation if it means that the same relatives would have to compete for resources.

Cooperation often has direct benefits to one s own offspring, leading to mutually beneficial behavior. Cooperation that increases population size could mean a decreased chance of getting eaten by predators. Cooperation can be enforced by punishing cheaters or rewarding cooperators. It does not have to be enforced if there is a shared benefit to cooperation. Meerkats can beat rival groups by cooperating to allow for a larger population.

Cooperation in order to increase group size is called group augmentation”. It is beneficial for subordinates to cooperate even though they don t breed themselves. Cooperation is enforced by ejecting subordinate meerkats who themselves get pregnant. Enforcement of cooperation by rewarding cooperators and punishing cheaters is necessary sometimes because it increases the chance of cooperation. Ostracism is a typical punishment for cheaters.

GROUP LIVING

Group living is when a species maintains some type of spatial proximity to one another. Group living is believed to have evolved after solitary living and happens in a species that gains an evolutionary advantage through group living. There is increased access to potential mates, increased ability to forage, increased protection against predators, and better access to social information. Groups can be heads, colonies, flocks, or other terms. Mixed species groups do exist in nature.

Group living is hard to distinguish from solitary living and the end result is often an arbitrary definition. Sometimes, group living happens only during mating, the gathering or resources, or the raising of young. Group living does not have to be continuous for it to be present. It is not applied to things like moths that gather around lights or groups of animals that gather around a water source. There needs to be some type of social interaction.