Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-21-2017
Originally Published In
PLoS Biol. 2017 Jun 21;15(6):e2000483. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2000483
Abstract
Cooperative breeding is an extreme form of cooperation that evolved in a range of lineages, including arthropods, fish, birds, and mammals. Although cooperative breeding in birds is widespread and well-studied, the conditions that favored its evolution are still unclear. Based on phylogenetic comparative analyses on 3,005 bird species, we demonstrate here that family living acted as an essential stepping stone in the evolution of cooperative breeding in the vast majority of species. First, families formed by prolonging parent–offspring associations beyond nutritional independency, and second, retained offspring began helping at the nest. These findings suggest that assessment of the conditions that favor the evolution of cooperative breeding can be confounded if this process is not considered to include 2 steps. Specifically, phylogenetic linear mixed models show that the formation of families was associated with more productive and seasonal environments, where prolonged parent–offspring associations are likely to be less costly. However, our data show that the subsequent evolution of cooperative breeding was instead linked to environments with variable productivity, where helpers at the nest can buffer reproductive failure in harsh years. The proposed 2-step framework helps resolve current disagreements about the role of environmental forces in the evolution of cooperative breeding and better explains the geographic distribution of this trait. Many geographic hotspots of cooperative breeding have experienced a historical decline in productivity, suggesting that a higher proportion of family-living species could have been able to avoid extinction under harshening conditions through the evolution of cooperative breeding. These findings underscore the importance of considering the potentially different factors that drive different steps in the evolution of complex adaptations.
Author summary
Cooperative breeding is a common form of cooperation in which individuals help raise conspecific offspring that are not their own. It has evolved in a range of lineages, including arthropods, fish, birds, and mammals. In birds, cooperative breeding is widespread and well-studied; however, the conditions that favored its evolution are still unclear. Based on an analysis of 3,005 bird species, we show that the evolution of this social system required 2 transitions. First, families formed by prolonging parent–offspring associations, and second, retained offspring began helping at the nest. We then show that the formation of families is associated with more productive and seasonal environments and that the subsequent evolution of cooperative breeding is linked to an increase in the variability of environmental productivity. These findings are consistent with patterns in insects and mammals (including humans) and clarify current disagreements on the role of environmental forces in the evolution of cooperation.
ORCID
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0955-2795 [Botero]
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Griesser, Michael; Drobniak, Szymon M.; Nakagawa, Shinichi; and Botero, Carlos A., "Family living sets the stage for cooperative breeding and ecological resilience in birds" (2017). Biology Faculty Publications & Presentations. 140.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/bio_facpubs/140
Data used for analyses
Comments
Griesser M, Drobniak SM, Nakagawa S, Botero CA (2017) Family living sets the stage for cooperative breeding and ecological resilience in birds. PLoS Biol 15(6): e2000483. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2000483
Copyright: © 2017 Griesser et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All relevant data required for the statistical analyses are within the paper and/or Supporting Information file S1 Data. The files that include the ancestral state reconstructions are available from Figshare https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4903076.v1. An up-to-date data set is available from Michael Griesser. We fully adhere to the data-sharing policy outlined in Mills et al. 2015, Trends in Ecology & Evolution 30 (10), 581-589.