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18 - Population density, social behaviour and sex allocation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Suzanne H. Alonzo  and
Ben C. Sheldon
Edited by
Tamás Székely ,
Allen J. Moore  and
Jan Komdeur
Suzanne H. Alonzo
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Ben C. Sheldon
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, UK
Tamás Székely
Affiliation:
University of Bath
Allen J. Moore
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
Jan Komdeur
Affiliation:
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands
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Summary

Overview

Evolution and ecology naturally intersect through birth, death and dispersal rates as they determine both population dynamics and individual fitness. However, we still understand very little about the connections between population dynamics, the evolution of individual behaviour patterns and the resulting social interactions. In this chapter, we first review how density affects individuals and discuss various ways in which population density is expected to influence social behaviour, using local competition for resources, reproductive cooperation and mating systems as illustrative examples. Following a brief introduction to evolutionary theory on sex allocation, we consider a few empirical examples from social insects, hermaphroditic fish, breeding birds and group-living mammals to demonstrate some of the observed patterns of sex allocation and the effect of density and social behaviour on these patterns. We then explore how sex allocation in hermaphrodites and sex ratios in cooperatively breeding animals can be used to demonstrate the links between sex allocation, sex ratio and social behaviours, as well as the difficulty and importance of understanding links between ecological and evolutionary dynamics generally. We finish the chapter with a discussion of directions for future empirical and theoretical research.

Introduction

Social behaviour takes diverse and fascinating forms in a wide variety of taxa, as the chapters in this book demonstrate. In this chapter, we examine the links between population density, social behaviour and sex allocation as an illustrative example of the general connection between individual-level processes and population patterns.

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Type
Chapter
Information
Social Behaviour
Genes, Ecology and Evolution
 , pp. 474 - 488
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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