EC August

We selected for the August issue two rather atypical contributions as editor’s choice. We see Oikos as a journal at the interface of ecology and evolution and decided to highlight a forum and research paper that are focusing on the genetic component of population dynamics: group living and extinction.

Using an inclusive fitness approach, Singh and Boomsma address the joint principles underlying the maintenance of punishment in animal societies. Punishment is not a unique human behaviour and found to be common in many social and eusocial arthropods and vertebrates which allows the maintenance of societal stability, and thus fitness of cooperating groups. In their forum paper, the authors provide a review of the policing behaviours across the social domains and the public goods they create. They use a punisher/bystander approach rooted in inclusive fitness logic to predict which individuals should take on punishing roles in animal societies. Variation in policing is demonstrated to depend on the dimensions of the social systems and the direct or indirect fitness benefits that motivate individuals to punish.

The research paper from Leonard Polishchuk and colleagues investigates the role of genetic relative to ecological drivers behind species extinction. They developed a simple, albeit (thus) elegant approach in which estimates of selection efficiency (based on the ratio of non-synonymous on synonymous mutation) and ecology (body size as a general central trait)  are contrasted among of >200 mammal species and linked to their status of risk according to IUCN. The contribution of genetic factors to extinction risk in mammals is estimated to be at least one quarter of the total of ecological and genetic effects. This study thus conforms the earlier intuition that ecological factors are the most important causes of species extinction. On the other hand, it shows that mutation accumulation and the subsequent (in)efficiency of selection confer a quantitative non-negligible driver of potential extinction risk in mammals.