Behavioral Ecology Vol. 11 No. 5: 572-573
© 2000 International Society for Behavioral Ecology
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Colonies as byproducts of commodity selection
a Konrad Lorenz Institute for Comparative Behavioral Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Savoyenstrasse 1a, A-1160 Vienna, Austria b Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Institut d'Ecologie, CNRS-URA 258, Bat. A, 7ème Etage, Case 237, 75252, Paris Cedex 05, France
Received 18 May 1999; revised 10 December 1999; accepted 3 January 2000.
When ecologists examine a colony, they tend to ask, what are the benefits
of breeding in aggregations? In contrast, when students of leks examine an
arena of displaying males, they usually ask, what are the mechanisms that
produce aggregations? Here we discuss the differences in these two approaches.
The value of this distinction stems from the frustrating inability of decades
of research to provide a general explanation of the widespread occurrence of
colonial breeding. The traditional approach to studying coloniality is the
measurement of costs and benefits of breeding in high density
(Barclay, 1988
;
Brown and Brown, 1996;
Emlen and Wrege, 1986;
Hoogland and Sherman, 1976;
Møller, 1987;
Wittenberger and Hunt, 1985).
Our aim is to illustrate how individuals can pursue adaptive strategies that
result in their joining breeding aggregations without necessarily obtaining
net benefits from the aggregation.
In a recent review (Danchin and
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