Events Detail

Speaker:
Yitzchak Ben-Mocha

This event is part of an event series „CASCB Seminar Series Winter 2023/24“.

Join the talk on Zoom

Understanding the causes and consequences of cooperative breeding is the focus of an increasing number of comparative meta-analyses. Nevertheless, recent studies demonstrate that datasets on vertebrates include systematic methodological biases, resulting in a growing number of scholars questioning their validity and calling for more rigorous curating work. Here, we present the Global Cooperative Breeding Database (GCoo-BreeD), a Konstanz-based initiative, which covers key biological parameters of cooperative breeding birds, mammals, and humans. We discuss how being a population-level, peer-reviewed and updatable database improves GCoo-BreeD’s data accuracy and replicability. We demonstrate GCoo-BreeD’s potential by presenting its first results showing, for example, that cooperation is more prevalent than commonly thought and how this more fine-tuned data contradicts previous studies. Finally, GCoo-BreeD can be used to classify species’ care system as a continuous (i.e. the percentage of cooperative units in the population), rather than a binary variable (i.e. cooperative versus non-cooperative breeders), thereby providing a more objective, systematic and accurate tool for species classification. Participants of the talk will be invited to contribute their data and join GCoo-BreeD as co-authors.

Yitzchak Ben Mocha is a postdoc at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, studying theoretical and empirical aspects of cooperative breeding. His empirical research on cooperation focuses mostly on wild Arabian babblers and Siberian jays. His comparative work aims to build a practical framework that integrates the study of human social evolution into the greater comparative research of cooperative breeding.