ArticleScience advances2021
Altruistic bet-hedging and the evolution of cooperation in a Kalahari bird.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Behavioural responses to heat in an arid-zone bird vary with thermal, hygric and social factors.Oecologia · 2026Article
- Cooperative breeding does not mitigate declines in offspring care with cool and wet conditions in a temperate Australian songbird.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Evolution of sex differences in cooperation can be explained by trade-offs with dispersal.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Altruism and natural selection in a variable environment.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Complex third-party effects in theProceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Dynamic altruistic cooperation within breast tumors.Molecular cancer · 2023Article
- Mothers in a cooperatively breeding bird increase investment per offspring at the pre-natal stage when they will have more help with post-natal care.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Group augmentation underlies the evolution of complex sociality in the face of environmental instability.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Egg components and offspring survival vary with group size and laying order in a cooperative breeder.Oecologia · 2023Article
- The ergodicity solution of the cooperation puzzle.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2022Review
- Prenatal environmental conditions underlie alternative reproductive tactics that drive the formation of a mixed-kin cooperative society.Science advances · 2022Article
- Longitudinal evidence that older parents produce offspring with longer telomeres in a wild social bird.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Helpers don't help when it's hot in a cooperatively breeding bird, the Southern Pied Babbler.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Altruism is globally associated with unpredictable environments, but we do not understand why. New theory has highlighted that unpredictable environments could favor the evolution of altruism if altruistic acts reduce environmentally induced variance in the reproductive success of relatives (“altruistic bet-hedging”). Here, we show that altruism does indeed reduce environmentally induced reproductive variance in a wild cooperative bird. Our decade-long field study reveals that altruistic helping actually has no overall effect on the mean reproductive success of relatives but instead reduces their reproductive variance. This remarkable pattern arises because helpers improve reproductive performance in dry conditions but reduce it in wet conditions. Helpers thereby specifically reduce rainfall-induced reproductive variance, the very mechanism required for altruistic bet-hedging to explain the enigmatic global association between avian altruism and unpredictable rainfall.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.