Cooperation among unrelated individuals: reciprocal altruism, by-product mutualism and group selection in fishes.

ABSTRACT

Cooperation among unrelated individuals can evolve not only via reciprocal altruism but also via trait-group selection or by-product mutualism (or some combination of all three categories). Therefore the (iterated) prisoner's dilemma is an insufficient paradigm for studying the evolution of cooperation. We replace this game by the cooperator's dilemma, which is more versatile because it enables all three categories of cooperative behavior to be examined within the framework of a single theory. Controlled studies of cooperation among fish provide examples of each category of cooperation. Specifically, we describe reciprocal altruism among simultaneous hermaphrodites that swap egg parcels, group-selected cooperation among fish that inspect dangerous predators and by-product mutualism in the cooperative foraging of coral-reef fish.