Behavioral Ecology Vol. 15 No. 1: 181-186
© 2004 International Society for Behavioral Ecology
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Ideal flea constraints on group living: unwanted public goods and the emergence of cooperation
a Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK
b Biodiversity Research Group, Department of Zoology, Charles University, Vini
ná 7, Prague 2, Czech Republic
Address correspondence to D. D. P. Johnson. E-mail: dominic@post.harvard.edu.
Received 24 September 2001; revised 11 February 2003; accepted 14 March 2003.
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INTRODUCTION |
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Long ago, Hamilton (1971) proposed that the "selfish herd" effect, while primarily thought to reduce predation risk, might also apply to avoiding parasites. Solitary individuals suffer higher ectoparasite burdens if they lack conspecifics either to absorb collateral damage from the local ectoparasite population or to remove ectoparasites by allogrooming. By grouping, therefore, animals may reduce their individual risk of exposure to parasites (Mooring and Hart, 1992
). This is important because there are significant fitness costs associated with ectoparasite loads. More ectoparasites take more blood, cause more irritation, increase the probability of infection, and decrease the time available for other activities, because grooming becomes a higher priority. These costs vary with group size because a greater number of hosts and shared den sites means ectoparasites are more likely to survive stochastic variation. The dynamics of parasite control might therefore present crucial constraints on group size and a novel origin for A simulation model
Model description
Model results
An empirical test
Methods
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RESULTS |
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Prediction 1 (group sizes should correlate with ectoparasite load)
Prediction 2 (variance should be greater between social groups than within them)
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DISCUSSION |
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Conclusions
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