Dispersal costs can be classified into energetic, time, risk and opportunity costs and may be
levied directly or deferred during departure, transfer and settlement. They may equally be …

Social interactions are ubiquitous across the animal kingdom. A variety of ecological and
evolutionary processes are dependent on social interactions, such as movement, disease …

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the occurrence of group living in spiders. Group
living has arisen in spiders in basically two different forms. Cooperative or nonterritorial …

A decrease in the surface area per unit volume is a well known constraint setting limits to the
size of organisms at both the cellular and whole-organismal levels. Similar constraints may …

Fungus cultivation by ambrosia beetles is one of the four independently evolved cases of
agriculture known in animals. Such cultivation is most advanced in the highly social subtribe …

Group living is predicted to arise only when the fitness benefits outweigh the costs of
sociality. Group-living species—including cooperatively breeding and family-living birds and …

Personality is essential for understanding the evolution of cooperation and conflict in
behavior. However, personality science remains disconnected from the field of social …

Behavioural ecologists often note that one or a few group members appear to shape the
collective behaviour of social groups differentially. Our understanding of these keystone …

Across several animal taxa, the evolution of sociality involves a suite of characteristics, a
“social syndrome,” that includes cooperative breeding, reproductive skew, primary female …

We examined a novel hypothesis for the maintenance of communal nesting in the
salamander, Hemidactylium scutatum, namely that communal nests are more likely than …