Co-operative breeder

Co-operative breeders recruit last year's grown up offspring or other adult helpers to help raise the latest brood or litter. The minders may look after the young in creches, or individually. Examples include bee-eaters, wolves and of course, humans. If grandma or a child minder helps look after the kids, then that's cooperative breeding!

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About

Cooperative breeding is a social system in which individuals help care for young that are not their own, at the expense of their own reproduction . This distinguishes it from alloparenting, which is simply the act of caring for another conspecfic's offspring. Cooperative breeding is also generally associated with reduced dispersal from the natal nest or range .

The non-parental care givers (alloparents) may be other potentially reproducing adults, as in the case of lionesses that litter at the same time nursing and caring for their cubs communally; reproductively mature but non-reproducing adults, as in subordinate wolves helping to feed and protect the pups of the alpha female; sub-fertile or infertile adults, such as the worker castes in social insect species; post-reproductive adults, as in human grandmothers caring for their grandchildren; or sub-adults, as in young Florida scrub-jays that stay with their parents a year or two as helpers at the nest before leaving to mate. Bi-parental care, in which a male forgoes pursuit of additional mating opportunities to serve as an allomother and help care for youngsters that are likely his offspring, shares many characteristics with cooperative breeding and could be considered a subset of it.

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