No task specialization among helpers in Damaraland mole-rats.
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Authors
Mendonça, Rute
Vullioud, Philippe
Torrents-Ticó, Miquel
Zöttl, Markus
Gaynor, David
Clutton-Brock, Tim
Publication Date
2018-09Journal Title
Anim Behav
ISSN
0003-3472
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Volume
143
Pages
9-24
Language
eng
Type
Article
Physical Medium
Print
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Thorley, J., Mendonça, R., Vullioud, P., Torrents-Ticó, M., Zöttl, M., Gaynor, D., & Clutton-Brock, T. (2018). No task specialization among helpers in Damaraland mole-rats.. Anim Behav, 143 9-24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2018.07.004
Abstract
The specialization of individuals in specific behavioural tasks is often attributed either to irreversible differences in development, which generate functionally divergent cooperative phenotypes, or to age-related changes in the relative frequency with which individuals perform different cooperative activities; both of which are common in many insect caste systems. However, contrasts in cooperative behaviour can take other forms and, to date, few studies of cooperative behaviour in vertebrates have explored the effects of age, adult phenotype and early development on individual differences in cooperative behaviour in sufficient detail to discriminate between these alternatives. Here, we used multinomial models to quantify the extent of behavioural specialization within nonreproductive Damaraland mole-rats, Fukomys damarensis, at different ages. We showed that, although there were large differences between individuals in their contribution to cooperative activities, there was no evidence of individual specialization in cooperative activities that resembled the differences found in insect societies with distinct castes where individual contributions to different activities are negatively related to each other. Instead, individual differences in helping behaviour appeared to be the result of age-related changes in the extent to which individuals committed to all forms of helping. A similar pattern is observed in cooperatively breeding meerkats, Suricata suricatta, and there is no unequivocal evidence of caste differentiation in any cooperative vertebrate. The multinomial models we employed offer a powerful heuristic tool to explore task specialization and developmental divergence across social taxa and provide an analytical approach that may be useful in exploring the distribution of different forms of helping behaviour in other cooperative species.
Sponsorship
NERC (1505720)
European Research Council (294494)
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2018.07.004
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/280022
Rights
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Licence URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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