IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Packer, C.; Ruttan, L. | |
| The evolution of cooperative hunting | |
| 1988 American Naturalist (132(2)): 159-198 | |
Cooperative hunting, probably the most widely distributed form of cooperative behavior in animals, is of considerable theoretical interest. First, cooperative hunting may be an important evolutionary cause of sociality. However, sociality can evolve for this reason only when the mutualistic advantages of cooperation are sufficiently high that the per capita rate of food intake within a hunting group exceeds that of a solitary individual (Sibley 1983; Pulliam and Caraco 1984, Clark and Mangel 1986). Second, differing characteristics of the prey may cause predators to show differing propensities to hunt in a truly cooperative manner. If groups of predators specialize on prey that is Iarge and risky to capture, an individud might benefit from refusing to cooperate during the hunt and then scavenging from its companions' kills. When it is impossible to scavenge from companions, however, there is not a similar temptation to cheat. An extensive body of data is available on the hunting success of solitary and social hunters, and group hunting has been studied in detail in many species of birds, mammals, fish, insects, and spiders. Nonetheless, no rigorous attempt has been made to explain the distribution of cooperative hunting across species. Furthermore, no study has examined the dynamics of group hunting from a theoretical perspective or explored the implication that group hunting is often no more effective than solitary hunting. We show here that the size and abundance of prey have important conse- quences for the expected behavior of individuals in hunting groups. We develop a series of simple game-theoretical models that illustrate the conditions under which cooperative hunting should occur and show how such cooperation can be detected. We test these predictions with data from 60 species and 28 different studies of group hunting. |
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