Delaying having kids to help raise the offspring of others seems
like a bad choice if you want to reproduce, but many African
starlings have adopted this strategy to deal with the
unpredictable climate of their savanna habitats, according to a
new study by University of California, Berkeley, and Cornell
University biologists. It appears in the Aug. 21 issue of the
journal Current Biology. This behavior, called cooperative
breeding, is typical of many animals, from insects and shrimp to
birds and even humans, but the reasons underlying its evolution
and distribution among such a wide array of species have been
unclear. In the new study, behavioral ecologist and evolutionary
biologist Dustin Rubenstein, a Miller Fellow in the Department
of Integrative Biology and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at
UC Berkeley, looked at the complete group of African starlings
and found that all of the cooperative breeders among these birds
live in savannas - highly seasonal habitats with great variation
in rainfall, and thus f