A paper by Feeney at al has recently been published in Science. The paper seeks to investigate the evolution of cooperation in birds. This is a hotly debated topic and previous research has focused on environmental effects and proposed that unstable and unpredictable environments would select for cooperation. However, other studies have proposed the exact opposite. This new work highlights a fairly novel line of enquiry, did cooperation evolve as a mechanism for defending against brood parasites? The authors correlate the distribution of cooperative breeders, who have hotspots in Australia and Sub-Saharan Africa, with the distribution of brood parasites. They found the correlation between these two groups of birds to be very strong. However, correlation is not causation. They then found that species who are hosts of brood parasites, in a given geographical region, are more likely to be cooperative breeders They propose three potential explanations for these results:

"(i) Brood parasites might selectively target cooperative breeders to maximize the care of their offspring (7); (ii) cooperative
breeders may be more obvious targets as a result of the increased activity of helpers near the nest (6, 7); and (iii) cooperative breeders may be better able to defend their nests against brood parasitism (7), selecting for cooperative breeding hosts."

They then tested these predictions by investigating with superb fairy-wrens and Horsefiled's bronze cuckoos. They found that cuckoo chicks grew faster when reared in larger groups, and they had a better chance of surviving to fledge. Cuckoos thus gain a potential fitness advantage from parasitizing large groups, but large groups had a lower parasitism rate. Therefore, the authors conclude that their results support hypothesis iii) cooperative breeders are better able to defend against brood parasites. They then tested mobbing behaviour of fairy wren groups and found that large groups were more vigilant around the nest and mobbed cuckoos for longer.

The results are interesting and provide a new perspective on the evolution of cooperation. The results show that cooperative breeding is of great benefit to reducing the costs of brood parasitism but it may not be the initial driver to cause cooperation to evolve.

As a side note and a perspective from me, cooperation does seem to provide benefits against interspecific brood parasitism, but it may also increases the risk of intraspecific brood parasitism: many studies have found that subordinate females will lay eggs in nests (for example Nelson-Flower et al 2013).

For more details and perspectives on this paper you can read Claire Spottiswoode's comments: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6165/1452.summary

Recently Australia has seemed like an ideal destination for scientists. It's economy remained strong whilst those in North American and Europe slowed, stagnated or declined, and it seemed willing to fund research and support science. Australia also genuinely seemed to value education and wanted to make its universities some of the best in the world. However, since the election of their new government things have begun to change. It was telling that one of Tony Abbot's first acts was to get rid of the Science Minister. I just wanted to draw attention to some of the comments that have been made in the Australian parliament regarding changes to their Australian Research Council Bill (link pasted below).
The comments by Craig Kelly highlight how badly informed and myopic some politicians are. Firstly, he repeated refers to making Australia more competitive. What does this mean? It is an ill-defined concept. Funding research will attract the best researchers to your universities, which in turn will attract the best students and companies, tv documentary crews... the list goes on from the knock-on effects of funding research. If he thinks that only funding research into biomedical fields will work then he is putting all of his eggs in one basket. There is no guarantee that funding medical research will create new drugs that will cure cancer or any such 'important' disease. Granted, there is never a guarantee that any research will provide the expected or anticipated results, but by funding research in the pursuit of knowledge so many world changing discoveries have been made. For example, one of the guys who invented the laser at Bell Laboratories came home from work and told his wife that what he had invented had no useful purpose, but it has changed the world (there are a plethora of other examples).
He also lists multiple studies that he deems pointless. But many of these have immediate application to the modern world and the problems we are currently facing. This highlights the fact that more trained scientists need to become involved in politics. We all love our ivory towers, but when such poorly informed people are holding the purse strings and influencing policy our ability to build our beloved ivory towers diminishes. More scientist need to become involved in policy and help fund research that may not provide direct benefits now but may do in the future. 

Link to comments by Craig Kelly 

One of the joys of being back in Cambridge is the ability to go to many high quality and interesting talks. These are held everyday of the week and since I have been back I have been able to go to talks ranging from colour polymorphism in damsel flies to work done by the Behavioural Insights Team. Today I went to a great talk entitled: Gender, Science and Myths of Merit by Professor Marlene Zuk (of the Hamilton-Zuk hypothesis fame).
The talk was engaging and interesting, illustrating the facts about a lack of women in higher academia and highlighting some of the information regarding why the current state of affairs may exist. She presented work that both startled and shocked me, particularly the fact that women who have kids and stay in science are no worse off than those that forego having children If anything some of the work showed that the women who do not have children are worse off. She highlighted that even in socially progressive countries like Sweden women are under-represented, Sweden has a lower percentage of women in high ranking positions than the US (which has a worse reputation for social progressive policies). The main take away message from her talk was that a large factor in this is the inherent bias that both men and women have against women. These innate stereotypes, which may be culturally induced, have the ability to influence our abilities and our decisions when making decisions about who to employ. These biases don't have to be big, a bias of 1% can lead to a large shift in sex ratios at higher levels.
But all is not lost, the more people know about these problems the more can be done to remedy them. Hopefully in the future policies that exclude sex from application forms and the increased exposure of high quality female scientist can lead to a more representative academic population. (And if 68% of biology undergrads are female, should 68% of tenured professors also be female..... food for thought).
Here are some papers that Prof Zuk presented results from:

Moss-Racusin et al (2012) Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students. PNAS 109: 16474-16479 http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.short

Lincoln et al (2011) Scholars' awards go mainly to men. Nature. 469:472
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v469/n7331/full/469472a.html

Wold, A., & Wennerås, C. (1997). Nepotism and sexism in peer review.Nature, 387(6631), 341-343.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v387/n6631/pdf/387341a0.pdf


Anyone who gets to see Prof Zuk at ASAB on Friday is in for a treat, great speaker!