News Details
In their recent paper titled, “Connecting and integrating cooperation within and between species”, published in Philosophical Transactions B, KLI Fellow Hari Sridhar, along with Judith L. Bronstein (University of Arizona) delve into the connexion between two different levels of cooperation, viz., within species cooperation and between-species cooperation which is termed as mutualism.
Research on cooperation in nature has historically progressed along two independent lines: cooperation among individuals of the same species has mostly attracted the attention of animal behaviourists and ethologists, while cooperation across species has been the subject matter mainly of community ecologists.
Hari Sridhar and Judith Bronstein attempt to bring these bodies of understanding together by highlighting ways in which these two forms of cooperation interact, ecologically and evolutionarily. They propose that such interaction can take two broad forms in nature: 1. In the case of trophic mutualisms, one type of cooperation can change the context and potentially the outcome of the other type; 2. In the case of mixed-species social groups, the benefits of cooperation are such that they can, in principle, be obtained from conspecifics or heterospecifics.
To back up their proposal, they provide a large number of published empirical examples that demonstrate such cross-linkages between within- and between-species cooperation. Bronstein and Sridhar conclude their article by pointing to future lines of research that they believe will help us better understand, both, the mechanisms underlying these cross-linkages and the roles they play in structuring biological communities.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Connected interactions: enriching food web research by spatial and social interactions’.
We are also happy to share that Hari's study system (mixed-species bird flocks) made it to the cover of this issue!!