Social evolution articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although intraspecific dominance hierarchies are common, large scale interspecific dominance hierarchies are unknown. Using data from hundreds of avian species, the authors find that species that are more familiar with each other engage in less aggression and the aggression is resolved more directly.

    • Gavin M. Leighton
    • , Jonathan P. Drury
    •  & Eliot T. Miller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Studies of the evolution of cooperation often assume information use that is inconsistent with empirical observations. Here, the authors’ research on general imitation dynamics reveals that cooperation is fostered by individuals using less personal information and more social information.

    • Xiaochen Wang
    • , Lei Zhou
    •  & Aming Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Animals differ remarkably in how parental care is distributed between the male and female parent. Here, the authors use evolutionary simulations to reveal that sex differences in care readily emerge in a characteristic manner that is not captured by current sex role theory.

    • Xiaoyan Long
    •  & Franz J. Weissing

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There is still no consensus on the factors favouring the evolution of same-sex sexual behaviour in mammals. This study presents evidence that it is a widespread behaviour that has evolved repeatedly in mammals, and that may play an adaptive role in bonding and conflict resolution.

    • José M. Gómez
    • , A. Gónzalez-Megías
    •  & M. Verdú

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Corral-Lopez et al. use guppies as a model system for the evolution of collective motion. They show that guppies artificially selected for schooling remain highly coordinated across predation contexts and show key changes in brain morphology that likely increase the efficiency of sensory information relay.

    • Alberto Corral-Lopez
    • , Alexander Kotrschal
    •  & Niclas Kolm

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The mechanisms behind the negative effects of social isolation on social species are unclear. Here, the authors examine colonies of carpenter ants, finding that behavioral, physiological, and lifespan changes may be caused by oxidative stress.

    • Akiko Koto
    • , Makoto Tamura
    •  & Laurent Keller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Individuals may benefit from adjusting their social relationships strategically in response to changing conditions, but evidence in wild animals is limited. Using an automated field experiment, the authors show that wild jackdaws learn to modify their social interactions to maximise foraging rewards, while retaining valuable long-term relationships.

    • Michael Kings
    • , Josh J. Arbon
    •  & Alex Thornton

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Workers in social insects such as honey bees, bumble bees, and ants are expected to spend their lives helping their mother reproduce. Here the authors show that workers of several bumble bee species can in fact mate and lead colonies of their own.

    • Mingsheng Zhuang
    • , Thomas J. Colgan
    •  & Jilian Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In stochastic games, there is a feedback loop between a group’s social behaviors and its environment. Kleshnina et al. show that groups are often more cooperative when they know the exact state of their environment, although there are also intriguing cases when ignorance is beneficial.

    • Maria Kleshnina
    • , Christian Hilbe
    •  & Martin A. Nowak

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Bacteria release and respond to autoinducers in a process known as quorum sensing. While classically viewed as a strategy to coordinate cell behaviour, Moreno-Gámez et al. demonstrate using modelling that quorum sensing may also be used to sense the environment as a collective by pooling information at relevant scales and harnessing the wisdom of the crowds.

    • Stefany Moreno-Gámez
    • , Michael E. Hochberg
    •  & G. S. van Doorn

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cooperative disease defense is part of group-level collective behavior. Here, the authors explore individual decisions, finding that garden ants increase grooming highly infectious individuals when they perceive a high pathogen load and suppress grooming after having been groomed by nestmates.

    • Barbara Casillas-Pérez
    • , Katarína Boďová
    •  & Sylvia Cremer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Indirect reciprocity describes how cooperation arises in a community when its members value their reputation. Here, the authors show that nuanced assessments of observations can mitigate disagreements and errors when the opinions of community members are not synchronized.

    • Laura Schmid
    • , Farbod Ekbatani
    •  & Krishnendu Chatterjee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A key hypothesis for the evolution of division of labour in social insects is that a shared set of genes – a genetic toolkit - regulates reproductive castes across species. Here, the authors analyze brain transcriptomes from nine species of social wasps to identify the factors that shape this toolkit.

    • Christopher Douglas Robert Wyatt
    • , Michael Andrew Bentley
    •  & Seirian Sumner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    To elucidate the relationship between sociality and longevity, the authors perform phylogenetic and transcriptomic comparative analysis of mammals. They find that group-living species lived longer than solitary species and identify 31 genes, hormones, and immunity-related pathways involved in this connection.

    • Pingfen Zhu
    • , Weiqiang Liu
    •  & Xuming Zhou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Division of labour, where members of a group specialise on different tasks, is a central feature of many social organisms. Using a theoretical model, the authors demonstrate that division of labour can emerge spontaneously within a group of entirely identical individuals.

    • Jan J. Kreider
    • , Thijs Janzen
    •  & Franz J. Weissing

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sociality has evolved repeatedly in arthropods. Tong et al. compare the genomes of 22 spider species with a range of social complexity and eight independent origins of sociality, and identify specific genetic changes associated with the evolution of sociality in spiders.

    • Chao Tong
    • , Leticia Avilés
    •  & Timothy A. Linksvayer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rewards can motivate people to cooperate, but the evolution of rewarding behavior is itself poorly understood. Here, a game-theoretic analysis shows that reputation effects facilitate the simultaneous evolution of cooperation and social rewarding policies.

    • Saptarshi Pal
    •  & Christian Hilbe

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Why do males typically compete more intensely for mating opportunities than do females and how does this relate to sex differences in gamete size? A new study provides a formal evolutionary link between gamete size dimorphism and ‘Bateman gradients’, which describe how much individuals of each sex benefit from additional matings.

    • Jonathan M. Henshaw
    • , Adam G. Jones
    •  & Lukas Schärer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In 1948, Bateman asserted that sexual selection is driven by the sex difference in gamete numbers. Lehtonen presents mathematical models broadly validating this controversial claim, while pointing out selection can be reversed under some conditions.

    • Jussi Lehtonen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In microorganisms, the cells within a population often show extreme phenotypic variation with different mechanisms used to determine how distinct phenotypes are allocated. This study uses theoretical models to examine the relative advantages of the two dominant mechanisms, coordinated and random determination, in dividing labour between reproductives and helpers in microorganisms.

    • Guy Alexander Cooper
    • , Ming Liu
    •  & Stuart Andrew West

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Cooperation is vulnerable to cheating, and both cooperation and cheating may be especially common in viruses. Here, Leeks et al. place diverse examples of viral cooperation and cheating within an evolutionary framework, highlighting opportunities emerging from greater synthesis of virology and evolutionary theory.

    • Asher Leeks
    • , Stuart A. West
    •  & Melanie Ghoul

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Obscuring knowledge of personal gains from individuals can theoretically maintain fairness in a cooperative group. Experiments show that wild, cooperatively breeding banded mongooses uncertain of kinship allocate postnatal care in a way that reduces inequality among offspring, suggesting a classic idea of moral philosophy can apply in biological systems.

    • H. H. Marshall
    • , R. A. Johnstone
    •  & M. A. Cant

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors examine how altruism can emerge as people come to trust a public institution of moral assessment, which broadcasts whether individuals have good or bad reputations for reciprocity.

    • Arunas L. Radzvilavicius
    • , Taylor A. Kessinger
    •  & Joshua B. Plotkin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social interaction outcomes can depend on the type of information individuals possess and how it is used in decision-making. Here, Zhou et al. find that self-evaluation based decision-making rules lead to evolutionary outcomes that are robust to different population structures and ways of self-evaluation.

    • Lei Zhou
    • , Bin Wu
    •  & Long Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many obligate symbionts, including parasites, have reduced genomes. A comparison of leaf-cutter ant genomes reveals parallel gene losses, particularly in olfactory receptors, in socially parasitic species compared to their closely-related hosts, consistent with relaxed selection for cooperative colony life in the parasites.

    • Lukas Schrader
    • , Hailin Pan
    •  & Christian Rabeling

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social animals have sophisticated ways of classifying relationships with conspecifics. Data from 30 years of observations and playback experiments on dolphins with a multi-level alliance system show that individuals form social concepts that categorize conspecifics according to their shared cooperative history.

    • Stephanie L. King
    • , Richard C. Connor
    •  & Simon J. Allen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mycelial fusion can favour fungal strains that exploit each other, but the mechanism is not well understood. Here, Grum-Grzhimaylo et al. show that different cheater lineages share similar deficiencies in initiating fusion that nevertheless enable them to preferentially obtain the benefits of fusion initiated by wild-type mycelia.

    • Alexey A. Grum-Grzhimaylo
    • , Eric Bastiaans
    •  & Duur K. Aanen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Strong social bonds are known to affect pairwise cooperation in primates such chimpanzees. Here, Samuni et al. show that strong social bonds also influence participation in group-level cooperation (collective action in intergroup encounters) using a long-term dataset of wild chimpanzees.

    • Liran Samuni
    • , Catherine Crockford
    •  & Roman M. Wittig

  • Article
    | Open Access

    As spiteful behaviors harm both the actor and the target, it is challenging to understand how these behaviors could be adaptive. Here Fulker et al. show that spite can be favored by feedbacks with network structure that create correlated and anti-correlated behavioral interactions simultaneously.

    • Zachary Fulker
    • , Patrick Forber
    •  & Christoph Riedl

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The causes and consequences of social intelligence are challenging to establish. A study on wild cleaner fish reports that large forebrains enable individuals to score higher in a social competence test, suggesting forebrain size is important for complex social decision-making.

    • Zegni Triki
    • , Yasmin Emery
    •  & Redouan Bshary

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    The social intelligence hypothesis predicts that social organisms tend to be more intelligent because within-group interactions drive cognitive evolution. Here, authors propose that conspecific outsiders can be just as important in selecting for sophisticated cognitive adaptations.

    • Benjamin J. Ashton
    • , Patrick Kennedy
    •  & Andrew N. Radford

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Most evolutionary game theory focuses on isolated games. Here, Donahue et al. present a general framework for ‘multichannel games’ in which individuals engage in a set of parallel games with a partner, and show that such parallel interactions favor the evolution of reciprocity across games.

    • Kate Donahue
    • , Oliver P. Hauser
    •  & Christian Hilbe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People regularly punish norm violations using gossip and direct confrontation. Here, the authors show that the use of gossip versus direct confrontation is context sensitive, with confrontation used more when punishers have more to gain, and gossip used more when the costs of retaliation loom large.

    • Catherine Molho
    • , Joshua M. Tybur
    •  & Daniel Balliet

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cleaner fish can cheat clients for higher rewards but this comes with a risk of punishment. Here, Truskanov et al. show that juvenile cleaner fish can learn by observing adults to behave more cooperatively themselves but also to prefer clients that are more tolerant to cheating.

    • Noa Truskanov
    • , Yasmin Emery
    •  & Redouan Bshary

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Strategic game payoffs often depend on the state of the environment, which in turn can be influenced by game strategies. Here, Tilman et al. develop a general framework for modeling strategic games with environmental feedbacks and analyze case studies from decision-making, ecology, and economics.

    • Andrew R. Tilman
    • , Joshua B. Plotkin
    •  & Erol Akçay

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Learning can involve the integration of individual and social information but disentangling these is challenging. Here, Canteloup and colleagues investigate social learning dynamics and transmission biases in wild vervet monkeys and how social information influences further asocial learning.

    • Charlotte Canteloup
    • , William Hoppitt
    •  & Erica van de Waal

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Acoustic communication is widespread, but not universal, across terrestrial vertebrates. Here, the authors show that acoustic communication evolved anciently, but independently, in most tetrapod groups and that these origins were associated with nocturnal activity.

    • Zhuo Chen
    •  & John J. Wiens

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Market integration may loosen the dense kinship networks maintaining high fertility among agriculturalists, but data are lacking. Here, Colleran shows that in 22 rural Polish communities, women’s ego networks are less kin-oriented, but not less dense, as market integration increases, potentially enabling low fertility values to spread.

    • Heidi Colleran

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ‘parliament of genes’ hypothesis suggests that selfish genetic elements will be counteracted by suppressors that maintain equal transmission of the rest of the genome. Here, the authors find support for this hypothesis using mathematical models to explore a range of different scenarios.

    • Thomas W. Scott
    •  & Stuart A. West

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Quorum sensing (QS) regulates production of ‘public goods’ by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which releases toxic hydrogen cyanide to constrain QS-deficient cheaters. Here, Yan et al. show that QS-proficient strains protect themselves by producing a cyanide-insensitive enzyme in response to reactive oxygen species released by cheaters.

    • Huicong Yan
    • , Kyle L. Asfahl
    •  & Meizhen Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Parental care can take many forms but how this diversity arises is not well understood. Here, the authors compile data for over 1300 amphibian species and show that different forms of care evolve at different rates, prolonged care can be easily reduced, and biparental care is evolutionarily unstable.

    • Andrew I. Furness
    •  & Isabella Capellini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Compared to motherhood, the molecular changes associated with fatherhood are less understood. Here, the authors investigate gene expression changes associated with paternal care in male stickleback fish, and compare them with patterns in territorial aggression.

    • Syed Abbas Bukhari
    • , Michael C. Saul
    •  & Alison M. Bell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The fish Astyanax mexicanus has divergent cave and river-dwelling eco-morphotypes. Here, Hyacinthe et al. show that cave and river fish communicate sonically, but that the sounds produced and the responses elicited in the two morphs depend differently on the social and behavioral context.

    • Carole Hyacinthe
    • , Joël Attia
    •  & Sylvie Rétaux

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Genetic diversity in social genes is expected to be shaped by conflict. Here, the authors show that in Dictyostelium discoideum, social genes in fact exhibit diversification patterns consistent with relaxed purifying selection, likely due to their expression only in intermittent social generations.

    • Janaina Lima de Oliveira
    • , Atahualpa Castillo Morales
    •  & Jason B. Wolf

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Queen pheromones are used by eusocial insects to regulate all aspects of colony life. Here, Holman et al. compare the effects of queen pheromone on gene expression and splicing in four eusocial insect species, giving insight into the mechanism and evolution of division of reproductive labour.

    • Luke Holman
    • , Heikki Helanterä
    •  & Alexander S. Mikheyev

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