It was with great fascination
that I read this paper on banded mongoose that appeared in the latest issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society
B: Biological Sciences. .DOI:
In a
16-year study in Queen Elizabeth National Park in southwest Uganda, University of Exeter researchers have
found out that intense levels of reproductive competition bring about
violent evictions of male and female banded mongooses from their family groups.
Another striking feature is that all group members help to raise pups even if they don't breed
themselves. All adult females
breed together, giving birth to a communal litter on exactly the same day. Eviction can also act as a major
source of gene flow in social animals.
The
researchers summarize their results like this.
“To
summarize, our results suggest that intrasexual reproductive competition is the
trigger for mass eviction of both sexes from groups of banded mongooses.
Eviction of females appears to alter the landscape of intrasexual competition
among males, leading to the mass eviction of males at the same time as, but
separate from, the eviction of females. We did not find evidence to link
eviction events to the enforcement of helping or the propagation of alleles
through a structured population. Nevertheless, our study highlights that the
consequences of resolving within-group reproductive competition can scale up to
affect population structure and demography. This link between within-group
conflict strategies and population processes has been little studied
theoretically or empirically, but may be an important determinant of
life-history evolution in viscous animal societies.”
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