2007/10/30 by Manfred Eberle, Peter M. Kappeler · 2 citations
Psychology · Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Social Sciences · #Primate Behavior and Ecology #Animal Behavior and Reproduction #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Lemur #Kin selection #Mutualism (biology) #Biology #Mobbing #Foraging #Evolutionary biology #Ecology #Cooperative breeding #Zoology #Social psychology #Primate #Psychology
paper · doi:10.1002/ajp.20496
openalex publication_date 2007/10/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
Predator mobbing is a widespread phenomenon in many taxa but the evolution of cooperative mobbing as an adaptive behavior is still subject to debate. Here, we report evidence for cooperative predator defense in a nocturnal solitarily foraging primate, the gray mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus). Several mouse lemurs mobbed a snake that held a non-related male conspecific until he could escape. Evolutionary hypotheses to explain cooperative mobbing include (1) by-product mutualism, when individuals defend others in the process of defending themselves; (2) reciprocity, where animals achieve a higher fitness when helping each other than when they do not cooperate; and (3) kin selection where animals help each other only if they share genes by common descent. Owing to the solitary activity of this species, reciprocity seems to be least likely to explain our observations. By-product mutualism cannot be ruled out entirely but, if costs of snake mobbing are relatively low, the available detailed socio-genetic information indicates that kin selection, rather than any of the other proposed mechanisms, is the primary evolutionary force behind the observed cooperative rescue.