Altruistic bet-hedging and the evolution of cooperation in a Kalahari bird

Altruism is globally associated with unpredictable environments, but we do not understand why. New theory has highlighted that unpredictable environments could favor the evolution of altruism if altruistic acts reduce environmentally induced variance in the reproductive success of relatives (“altruistic bet-hedging”). Here, we show that altruism does indeed reduce environmentally induced reproductive variance in a wild cooperative bird. Our decade-long field study reveals that altruistic helping actually has no overall effect on the mean reproductive success of relatives but instead reduces their reproductive variance. This remarkable pattern arises because helpers improve reproductive performance in dry conditions but reduce it in wet conditions. Helpers thereby specifically reduce rainfall-induced reproductive variance, the very mechanism required for altruistic bet-hedging to explain the enigmatic global association between avian altruism and unpredictable rainfall.