Living together: Cooperation and conflict in the Sociable Weaver
Living together: Cooperation and conflict in the Sociable Weaver
In animal societies individuals cooperate in order to achieve vital things, such as foraging, avoiding predators or reproducing. But cooperation represents an evolutionary puzzle because natural selection is thought to favour selfish individuals over co-operators, which should lead to conflict and ultimately to the collapse of cooperation. We have been investigating the benefits and costs of cooperation through a long-term study of the Sociable Weaver Philetairus socius at Benfontein Nature Reserve in South Africa.
These birds are highly social and cooperate to achieve various tasks – from communally building their massive nest structure to mobbing predators or raising young – providing an excellent model to study cooperation. However, sociable weaver societies can also be rife with conflict, with consequences varying from social exclusion to extreme behaviours such as infanticide. Ultimately our long-term study aims to understand the factors that influence the balance between cooperation and conflict, allowing cooperation to be maintained and animal societies to persist. Here I will provide an overview of 10 years of work and the main results obtained.
Organizer
Dr Rita Covas is a behavioural ecologist and evolutionary biologist with a strong interest in the evolution and consequences of sociality and a passion for fieldwork. She uses birds as study models having worked on cooperation using the sociable weaver for nearly 20 years and since 2016 she has been conducting research on another cooperative bird, the southern-ground hornbill. Rita also has a keen interest on island birds, and her research on this topic is mostly done through comparative work and fieldwork in the Gulf of Guinea islands. Rita is a Principal Researcher at CIBIO, University of Porto (Portugal) and Honorary Research Associate at the FitzPatrick Institute, University of Cape Town (South Africa).