Kinship has little influence on cooperation in rats
Published: Wednesday, Dec 11th 2024, 16:10
Back to Live Feed
Rats cooperate with conspecifics from whom they have previously been freed from a trap. Kinship plays no role in this, as a study by the University of Bern has shown.
A team from the Department of Behavioral Ecology at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bern investigated the advantages of releasing a conspecific. Does it offer future opportunities for cooperation in the search for food? Or does it primarily serve to support relatives?
The study showed that the previously experienced help was responsible for the willingness to cooperate, while the relationship between the animals played no role, as the university wrote in a press release on Wednesday.
"As a rule, it is assumed that the willingness to cooperate depends strongly on whether the animals are related to each other," Michael Taborsky, head of the study, is quoted as saying. Once again, rats are an example of the fact that social experience and experienced help are more important for the willingness to cooperate than genetic similarity due to kinship, according to Taborsky.
Empathy not a purely human characteristic?
The results of the study shed new light on the question of the biological roots of empathy. The fact that rats cooperate more readily and better with their liberators suggests that helpful behavior towards conspecifics in need can increase their own chances of survival and reproduction and therefore spread in the course of evolution.
According to Taborsky, this could mean "that compassionate behavior is promoted by natural selection and thus has a biological basis. But it also suggests that empathy may not be a purely human trait."
The results of the study were published in the journal iScience.
©Keystone/SDA
English 
German 
French 
Spanish 
Arabic