Kin Recognition - Why should animals be able to recognise their kin? Can they? How?

... Kin Recognition Why should animals be able to recognise their kin? Can they? How? Ethology concerns the interaction between the animal in question and it's environment. Perhaps one of the most interesting fields of ethology is how animals interact with each other. This could be noting the behaviours between predator and prey or interspecies competition, but the area that raises the most questions (mainly because so little is known about it) is that of how intraspecies behaviours occur and what are their underlying mechanisms. In this essay I will talk about one specific intraspecies behaviour, kin recognition, why animals do it, does it really occur and if so how it occurs. Kin recognition is best described in it broadest sense as being the differential treatment of conspecifics (including self) differing in genetic relatedness (Sherman & Holmes 1985). What this refers to is how an animal reacts in its behaviour towards members of

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