Personality traits, such as the propensity to cooperate, are often inherited from parents to offspring, but the pathway of inheritance is unclear. Traits could be inherited via genetic or parental effects, or culturally via social learning from role models. However, these pathways are difficult to disentangle in natural systems as parents are usually the source of all of these effects. Here, we exploit natural ‘cross fostering’ in wild banded mongooses to investigate the inheritance of cooperative behaviour. Our analysis of 800 adult helpers over 21 years showed low but significant genetic heritability of cooperative personalities in males but not females. Cross fostering revealed little evidence of cultural heritability: offspring reared by particularly cooperative helpers did not become more cooperative themselves. Our results demonstrate that cooperative personalities are not always highly heritable in wild, and that the basis of behavioural traits can vary within a species (here, by sex).

中文翻译：

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双谱系揭示了野生带状猫鼬中合作个性的遗传而非文化遗传

性格特征，例如合作倾向，通常从父母遗传给后代，但遗传途径尚不清楚。性状可以通过遗传或父母的影响遗传，也可以通过从榜样的社会学习在文化上遗传。然而，这些途径在自然系统中很难解开，因为父母通常是所有这些影响的来源。在这里，我们利用野生带状猫鼬中的自然“杂交培育”来研究合作行为的遗传。我们对超过 21 年的 800 名成年助手的分析表明，男性而非女性的合作型人格的遗传遗传力较低但显着。交叉寄养几乎没有发现文化遗传性的证据：由特别合作的助手抚养的后代本身并没有变得更加合作。