Contributions to cooperative rearing in meerkats
T. H. Clutton-Brock, P. N. M. Brotherton, M. J. O'Riain, A. S. Griffin, D. Gaynor, R. Kansky, L. Sharpe, and G. M. McIlrath
a Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge
b Mammal Research Group, University of Pretoria
c Institute of Cell, Animal and Population Biology, University of Edinburgh
Received 3 April 2000; revised 2 June 2000; accepted 17 November 2000. ; Available online 12 March 2002.
In vertebrate societies where young are reared communally, nonbreeding helpers are usually closely related to young but often vary widely in their contributions to feeding them. Evolutionary explanations of helping behaviour have focused on whether differences in the level of contributions between helpers are related to variation in kinship. We investigated the contribution of helpers in meerkats, Suricata suricatta. The helpers varied widely in the number of food items they gave to pups and individual differences were related to variation in foraging success as well as to sex and age. When we controlled the influence of these variables, the level of contributions that helpers made to rearing pups was not significantly correlated with variation in kinship to the litters they were rearing.
f1 Correspondence: T. H. Clutton-Brock, Large Animal Research Group, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, U.K. (email:thcb@cam.ac.uk).
f2 M. J. O'Riain, D. Gaynor, R. Kansky, L. Sharpe and G. M. McIlrath are at the Mammal Research Institute, University of Pretoria, 0002 Pretoria, Republic of South Africa.
f3 A. S. Griffin is at the Institute of Cell, Animal and Population Biology, University of Edinburgh, Ashworth Laboratories, King's Buildings, West Mains Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JT, U.K.