When to kill and when to care for another female's offspring?
Dieter Lukas
Univ. of Cambridge
Female relationships across mammals range from highly supportive to intensively aggressive, often within the same species. While differences in the structure of female relationships may have played a major role in the evolution of mammalian sociality (Lukas & Clutton-Brock 2013), only few studies have investigated why and how female interactions differ across species. In this presentation, I will show that competition between females is frequently as intense as what has been reported for males (Lukas & Clutton-Brock 2014), and that variation in the intensity of female competition is linked to female reproductive investment. Finally, I will discuss how competition influences cooperation between females (MacLeod & Lukas 2014).
Lukas, D. & Clutton-Brock, T. H. 2013. The evolution of social monogamy in mammals. Science, 341, 526-530.
MacLeod, K. J. & Lukas, D. Revisiting non-offspring nursing: allonursing evolves when the costs are low. Biology Letters, 10, 20140378.
Lukas, D. & Clutton-Brock, T. Costs of mating competition limit male lifetime breeding success in polygynous mammals. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281, 20140418.
Contact Elise Huchard
Contact du Comité SEEM: seem@services.cnrs.fr.
Contact du Labex CEMEB: gestion.cemeb@univ-montp2.fr, www.labex-cemeb.org.