Yellow-bellied marmots live in colonies with a single dominant male
Maria Janicki/Alay
Friendly groups of marmots may help settle an ongoing evolutionary debate: whether the characteristics of a group may be more important to an individual’s chances of survival than the characteristics of that individual. Analysis of their behavior in wild animals is the first evidence of this evolutionary idea, known as multilevel selection.
“What we found is that group traits are under as strong selection as individual traits, if not slightly stronger,” he says. Conner Philson then at the University of California, Los…
