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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 22, 2025

Simultaneous Assessment of Kinship, Division Number, and Phenotype via Flow Cytometry for Hematopoietic Stem and Progenitor Cells

Simultaneous Assessment of Kinship, Division Number, and Phenotype via Flow Cytometry for Hematopoietic Stem and Progenitor Cells

Published on: March 24, 2023

Kinship composition in mammals.

André S Pereira^1,2, Delphine De Moor¹, Catarina Casanova^2,3

¹Centre for Research in Animal Behavior, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QG, UK.

Royal Society Open Science

|July 21, 2023

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Mammalian social groups often include both related and unrelated individuals. This finding is crucial for understanding the evolution of social behavior and cooperation in mammals.

Keywords:

cooperation group-living kinship pedigree relatedness sociality

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Area of Science:

Evolutionary biology
Behavioral ecology
Mammalogy

Background:

Understanding the evolution of group-living and cooperation necessitates knowledge of social associations.
Kinship structure within groups significantly impacts the benefits and costs of sociality.
Kinship composition, the presence of related and unrelated individuals, is a key but understudied aspect of group structure.

Purpose of the Study:

To characterize the kinship composition of mammalian social groups.
To establish an initial dataset on mammalian kinship composition using published literature.
To provide a foundation for future research on the evolution of sociality.

Main Methods:

Systematic review of published literature on mammalian social groups.
Data compilation on the presence of kin and non-kin within social groups.
Analysis of kinship composition across 18 mammalian species.

Main Results:

In approximately half of the 18 sampled mammalian species, individuals lived exclusively with same-sex kin.
In the other half, individuals cohabited with both related and unrelated individuals of the same sex.
Living with unrelated same-sex individuals is common in social mammals.

Conclusions:

Mammalian social structures frequently involve associations with non-kin, challenging previous assumptions.
Both direct and indirect fitness benefits likely drive the evolution of mammalian sociality.
This study provides a foundational dataset and insights to stimulate further research into kinship structure and social evolution.