Reproductive strategies

Reproductive strategies Study finds that the slower 'eusocial' system in nature offers high risks, high rewards I t's a cliché to say it takes a village to raise a child, but it's a cliché some creatures have taken to heart. A handful of animals, including ants, bees, termites, and some birds, are what scientists call "eusocial." That is, they live in tight-knit groups in which some individuals give up some of their reproductive capacity to care for the offspring of others. While there has been extensive study on how such reproductive strategies might emerge, the question that has long remained unanswered is why an organism might adopt such a strategy in the first place. A new study, co-authored by Sarah Kocher, a postdoctoral researcher in Harvard's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, may offer some answers. When compared with a solitary strategy of producing offspring who then go on to produce their own offspring, Kocher and colleagues including Feng Fu, a former postdoc at Harvard and now a research fellow at ETH Zurich, and Martin Nowak, director of Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, found that eusociality is a high-risk, high-reward gamble. The study is described in a new paper in the journal Ecology Letters. Because it often relies on a single reproductive female - think of the queen bee in a hive - the eusocial strategy carries high risk.