Abstract
Members of animal societies compete over resources and reproduction, but the extent to which such conflicts of interest are resolved peacefully (without recourse to costly or wasteful acts of aggression) varies widely. Here, we describe two theoretical mechanisms that can help to understand variation in the incidence of overt behavioural conflict: (i) destruction competition and (ii) the use of threats. The two mechanisms make different assumptions about the degree to which competitors are socially sensitive (responsive to real-time changes in the behaviour of their social partners). In each case, we discuss how the model assumptions relate to biological reality and highlight the genetic, ecological and informational factors that are likely to promote peaceful conflict resolution, drawing on empirical examples. We suggest that, relative to males, reproductive conflict among females may be more frequently resolved peacefully through threats of punishment, rather than overt acts of punishment, because (i) offspring are more costly to produce for females and (ii) reproduction is more difficult to conceal. The main need now is for empirical work to test whether the mechanisms described here can indeed explain how social conflict can be resolved without overt aggression.
Highlights
In the context of sexual selection, competition among females has been much less well studied than competition among males, but the same is not true in the context of social evolution
The focus on females has arisen in part because of enduring interest in the evolutionary puzzle posed by sterile worker castes in the female societies of Hymenoptera [6,7]; and because of observations of conspicuous forms of female competition in cooperative vertebrates, including mutual egg destruction, infanticide and eviction [8,9,10,11,12,13,14]
Shares of the resource are determined by a first step in which players invest sealed bid conflict efforts x and y, but both players can respond by exercising a threat to break up the group if their share of the resource drops below a threshold level
Summary
In the context of sexual selection, competition among females has been much less well studied than competition among males, but the same is not true in the context of social evolution. She may wield subtle means of reproductive control, for example, by raising the costs of breeding to other females through harassment [8], or threatening to attack or evict them if they attempt to breed [38,45] Some of these behavioural mechanisms for resolving conflict (such as aggression) are conspicuous to an observer, whereas others (such as the threat of infanticide or eviction) are more difficult to detect. We are concerned to identify conditions and mechanisms which permit reproductive conflict to be settled peacefully, that is, without recourse to destructive or costly acts of harassment, attack, infanticide or forcible eviction These behaviours can be grouped together as forms of ‘overt aggression’, but may have very different underlying causes. Our main empirical focus is on social mammals and birds because these are the systems where, for reasons explained below, female reproductive competition seems most likely to be settled without overt aggression
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