Lecture 9- Recognition

Question 1

direct and indirect benefits of kin recognition

Answer 1

direct- avoiding inbreeding depression
indirect- helps with cooperation and avoiding competition with kin

Question 2

conditions when recognition should be strong

Answer 2

-individuals are likely to encounter kin and non-kin
-payoffs are high

Question 3

what kind of circumstances would inbreeding risk be higher

Answer 3

neighbours near to each other, higher average relatedness within a population

Question 4

when is there more kin discrimination in the context of cooperation

Answer 4

when relatedness is lower, as there needs to be more discrimination- also when cooperation is more beneficial

Question 5

when is kin discrimination weakly selected for

Answer 5

when fitness is gained by helping any group member

Question 6

how (very roughly) does kin recognition work

Answer 6

reliance on rules of thumb using environmental and phenotypic cues, often based around simple decision rules

Question 7

what is family referent matching

Answer 7

looking for similarity to family members whose phenotype is already known- sort of ‘templates’

Question 8

different kinds of templates

Answer 8

group recognition- accepting anyone with a specific characteristic
individual recognition- accepting a specific set of cues

Question 9

self referent matching

Answer 9

looking for similarity to self- ‘online processing’- where own cues are learnt and stored as a template

Question 10

why might parental recognition be better

Answer 10

parental alleles shared by all sibs, whereas self cues may noy- possibly more reliable?

Question 11

requirements for phenotypic cues

Answer 11

strongly correlated with genotype
robust to other associated changes
variable

Question 12

example of kin recognition using immune genes

Answer 12

histocompatibility in tunicates- MHCs as a compatibility cue
also potentially some evidence in mice but its weird

Question 13

signal detection theory

Answer 13

animal can detect similarity to the actor template, beyond a certain point of similarity there is recognition- desirable levels of similarity

Question 14

issues with a stringent or accepting threshold

Answer 14

stringent- lots of rejection errors
accepting- costs of accepting non-kin- acceptance errors

Question 15

example of helping in birds

Answer 15

long-tailed tits, ‘redirected help’ behaviour when breeding fails

Question 16

pattern of avoiding inbreeding

Answer 16

observed breeding pair relatedness seems to be fairly in line with expectations for avoidance of 1st order relatives

Question 17

what can be used as a relatedness cue in birds

Answer 17

calls- generally very similar in 1st-order kin, more dissimilar in non-kin (peaks around 0.25 difference)

Question 18

example of environmental changes which can influence thresholds

Answer 18

cost of making the error- e.g. if food is plentiful, costs are a lot lower of helping non-nestmates
risk of making an error- e.g. more likely to reject cuckoo eggs when there is cuckoos in the environment

Question 19

selective process which helps maintain variation in traits

Answer 19

negative frequency dependent selection, helps facilitate individual recognition