Cooperative behaviour and cooperative breeding: What constitutes an explanation?

We all have experienced the proliferation of electronic access o manuscripts and various Internet-based search tools for scienific literature. Nevertheless, it remains a tall order for a scientist o find all relevant information that will advance his or her thinkng on a subject. Sometimes the lack of communication can be lamed on different terminology or even geographic distance Wong and Kokko, 2005), but regardless of the obstacles that eed to be overcome, one should avoid reinventing the wheel r progressing in different directions when common themes xist. Unfortunately, examples of taxon-myopic or otherwise nnecessarily constrained thinking are abundant. Already while tudying lekking behaviour for my PhD, I was struck by how arely papers on lekking birds cited any literature on lekking ammals, and vice versa. Limitations of web-based searches ertainly cannot be the blame when the same keywords appear n both fields. Likewise, there is no excuse for a lack of informaion flow between people studying cooperative behaviours and hose who focus on cooperative breeding. Yet, despite the fact hat to a layman the terms sound almost identical, Bergmuller et l. (2007) show that the study of these two fields has proceeded lmost completely separately. Perhaps such a gap is what is expected wherever theoreticians nd empiricists try to meet. In the theory-dominated cooperaive behaviour literature, empirical examples sometimes appear lmost anecdotal or, to be more fair, they concentrate on a ew model organisms. The topic of cooperative breeding, on he other hand, is strongly driven by field studies of a great iversity of organisms (although again, the efforts of theoretiians in this area should not be neglected). Thus, the unifying fforts by Bergmuller et al. (2007) should be extremely valu-