ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Differences in cooperative behavior among Damaraland mole rats are consequences of an age-related polyethism.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Flexibility in task performance and division of labour in a cooperatively breeding cichlid.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2026Article
- Task allocation in a cooperative breeder reflects current needs, not early-life experience.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Quantitative and systematic behavioral profiling reveals social complexity in eusocial naked mole-rats.Science advances · 2025Article
- Workload distribution in wild Damaraland mole-rat groups.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Division of labour in colony defence in a clonal ant.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Division of labour as key driver of social evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Helping niches may trigger the development of task specialization and division of labour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The evolution of division of labour: preconditions and evolutionary feedback.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Evidence for inbreeding depression in captive Damaraland mole-rats.Biology letters · 2024Article
- Evolution of sex differences in cooperation can be explained by trade-offs with dispersal.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- How to treat mixed behavior segments in supervised machine learning of behavioural modes from inertial measurement data.Movement ecology · 2024Article
- Phylogenetic modeling of enhancer shifts in African mole-rats reveals regulatory changes associated with tissue-specific traits.Genome research · 2023Article
- Behavioural, demographic and fitness consequences of social instability in cooperatively breeding dwarf mongoose groups.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Damaraland mole-rats do not rely on helpers for reproduction or survival.Evolution letters · 2023Article
- Bacteroidetes to Firmicutes: captivity changes the gut microbiota composition and diversity in a social subterranean rodent.Animal microbiome · 2023Article
- Perioral secretions enable complex social signaling in African mole-rats (genus Fukomys).Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Individual variation explains ageing patterns in a cooperatively breeding bird, the long-tailed tit Aegithalos caudatus.The Journal of animal ecology · 2022Article
- The naked truth: a comprehensive clarification and classification of current 'myths' in naked mole-rat biology.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Review
- Freeze-drying can replace cold-chains for transport and storage of fecal microbiome samples.PeerJ · 2022Article
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7 authors.
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Abstract
In many cooperative breeders, the contributions of helpers to cooperative activities change with age, resulting in age-related polyethisms. In contrast, some studies of social mole rats (including naked mole rats, Heterocephalus glaber, and Damaraland mole rats, Fukomys damarensis) suggest that individual differences in cooperative behavior are the result of divergent developmental pathways, leading to discrete and permanent functional categories of helpers that resemble the caste systems found in eusocial insects. Here we show that, in Damaraland mole rats, individual contributions to cooperative behavior increase with age and are higher in fast-growing individuals. Individual contributions to different cooperative tasks are intercorrelated and repeatability of cooperative behavior is similar to that found in other cooperatively breeding vertebrates. Our data provide no evidence that nonreproductive individuals show divergent developmental pathways or specialize in particular tasks. Instead of representing a caste system, variation in the behavior of nonreproductive individuals in Damaraland mole rats closely resembles that found in other cooperatively breeding mammals and appears to be a consequence of age-related polyethism.
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