Cooperate or speciate: new theory for the distribution of passerine birds

In cooperatively breeding birds, adults often forego reproduction and help care for the offspring of others. A universal explanation for this mode of breeding has eluded evolutionary biologists, who have considered it to be a rare, and largely Australian, phenomenon. In a recent paper, Andrew Cockburn reports that the number of known cooperative breeders among oscine passerine birds has more than doubled since the last substantial review, published 16 years ago. Cooperative breeding is often the ancestral trait, and predominantly cooperative genera are species poor compared with their pair-breeding counterparts. Cockburn argues that speciation is less likely in cooperative clades, because the philopatric tendencies of individuals make them poor dispersers, colonizers and migrants. This new hypothesis helps explain the distribution and composition of migrant and island avifauna. However, a major challenge remains to reconcile the roles of phylogenetic history and current ecology in promoting cooperative behaviour.