Question 1:
How might both kin selection and kin recognition rules be useful in understanding cases of “adoption” in animals?
Question 2:
Imagine that you are studying two populations of tropical lizards that inhabit areas where high-quality food items are distributed patchily (i.e., it would take some time to travel from patch to patch). Lizard population A inhabits an area with high predation risk while lizard population B inhabits an areawith low predation risk (e.g., birds of prey). How might you expect foraging patterns to differ between these two lizard populations with respect to thetime spent in a given patch?
Question 3:
In winter most small seed-eating birds (titmice, chickadees, cardinals) in New England and other temperate habitats form mixed-flock assemblages. Why?
Question 4:
Work from neuroeconomics has shed light on the neurobiology of cooperation in humans. What sorts of evolutionary questions come to mind when you readabout these proximate studiesinneuroeconomics?
Question 5:
Don’t like any of these questions? Ask one of your own, and then answer it. Note that your question should be substantive, just like your answer, and the question should be in a format that invites further discussion. Avoid questions like “Why are kittens cute?” or “Are sharks vicious?”
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Answer 1
Kin selection refers to the strategy that is concerned with reproductive success for the organism. The strategy involved in the kin selection is to protect the relative and help them in survival, which even is executed at the cost of survival of organism itself. It is also known as altruistic behavior where the driving force is calculated based on the number of offsprings produced by an organism in conjunction with a number of offspring that can be produced with support from others.
Thus the discrimination in this aspect is made on the basis of fitness and only those mutations are selected, which cause benefits (Strassmann, Page, Robinson & Seeley, 2011). On the other hand kin recognition is the ability of organism to discriminate based on kinship. In many higher forms of kin recognition is also responsible for avoiding the inbreeding characteristics. Often the mechanism of kin selection is based on shared developmental environment, social relationship, and familiarity with each other.
The actions that are adopted by organism for recognition and protection of closely related species is executed with triggering of aggressive calls, physical fighting, and chasing. Likewise, parental investment is also an indicative of this phenomenon. As mentioned above, among the higher order species, kin selection and kin recognition is responsible for social bonding and conflicts among discriminated individuals (Lizé, Khidr & Hardy, 2012).
