A male and a female ostrich switching over incubation of their eggs. Image credit: Julian Melgar (CC BY 4.0)
Being a parent is hard work. The unrelenting demand for food and protection is exhausting. Now imagine being a parent on the hot African savannah. Food and water are scarce, and whenever you leave your offspring, they overheat, or something eats them. This is the reality for ostriches. They, like humans, cope with the challenges of parenthood by sharing childcare responsibilities.
Ostriches live in groups, breed in a communal nest, and take it in turns to incubate their eggs. This helps to maximize the survival of their offspring, but it has its downsides. The bigger a group gets, the more its members have to compete over mates and space for their eggs in the nest. The balance between cooperation and competition should, in theory, result in one 'optimal' group size. But this pattern does not seem to hold true: in the wild, ostrich families vary wildly in size and composition.
To find out why, Melgar et al. set up dozens of groups of breeding ostriches and gave them different opportunities to cooperate. For males, there was one group size that maximized the number of offspring they produced (reproductive success): a single male with four or more females. Males did not benefit much from cooperation, and suffered greatly from competing with other males for mates. For females, however, the story was different. They benefited much more than males from cooperation and did best in bigger groups where they could share egg care with other individuals. Middle-sized groups were not good for either sex because reproduction was hard to coordinate: males continued to pursue copulations after females had initiated incubation, resulting in eggs being exposed and broken. The different priorities of males and females explain why there is no single optimal group size for ostriches.
How groups balance competition and cooperation is a fundamental question in biology. Why do some organisms prefer to live alone, while others thrive in large groups? Understanding more about the balance of priorities within a group could hold the answers. It could also help to inform conservation work and animal breeding by showing how different social pressures influence breeding success.
