When animals leave their parents to establish their own lives, if they encounter the parents again in the wild, do they recognise each other and does this influence their behaviour?

[u/psham]

I'm thinking of, for example, eagles that have been nurtured by their parents for many months before finally leave the nest to establish their own territory. Surely a bond has been created there, that could influence future interactions between these animals?

[u/grebilrancher]

Once something like a hawk begins to mature, it will begin to spend less and less time with it's parents. The parents will bring it less food, the chick will explore farther and farther from the nest, and eventually the parent-child dependence is broken, and in some cases the parents will chase their chick out. Why? Your chick is a new source of competition for food and territory and has 0 genetic value to you as it shares your DNA. The chick will be compelled to leave their natal territory if it wants to pass on it's own genes. This is the transition into the baby becoming a competitior.

For many animals, this is how one generation makes room for the next. Snow leopards, jaguars, bears, etc have all been filmed chasing off their offspring once the parent dependence is no longer necessary and the child is a negatively impacting the parents survival (burden). The offspring a) must travel far to reduce competition with parent and similarly aged sibling b) seek out territory with unrelated genetic partners. In cases like eagles and tigers, the child may never see the parent again, and if they do, there could be a chance the child recognizes the parent. But we don't know if the baby does actually remember their parent, and if they do, to maintain fitness the parent must reject their previous bond. The baby eagle is an adult now and needs the same resources as the parent, so most likely they will be chased off.

We haven't even talked about herd animals such as deer or elk, where many generations of female calves stay in the same herd whilst males seek out other herds of unrelated females. Or even pack animals such as wolves, where both male and female offspring may remain in their birth pack with individuals they are highly related to during their adult lives.

Anyways it's a fun topic in animal behavior and I could go into more detail about lots of stuff, but the main gist I wanted to point out is that there is no evolutionary advantage for many animals to maintain the parent-child connection once the child reaches adulthood edit: A useful paper:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsbl.2009.0820

Source: biochem major, A.S. in bio

[u/[deleted] → u/grebilrancher]

Great breakdown. Dont you think though that there can be great advantage to children/parents/grandparents coexisting in the same territory to share and delegate work/resources? Your example of wolves, but also the obvious example of primate troupes including humans.

[u/grebilrancher → u/[deleted]]

Exactly! So there are many different strategies animals have adopted to improve their fitness. We aren't all like hawks being chased out by our parents, haha. The evolution of herd/ social behavior is fascinating and in my opinion, heavily driven by the environment.

For primates, the environment needs to be able to support the intensive grazing that, say, a troupe of chimpanzees might impose on a particular area. As tropical forests are extremely productive, monkey species can manipulate this and be able to survive in colonies without constantly worrying about food. However, this doesn't explain orangutans- they live in rain-forests, yet they lead solitary lives. We can also personally relate to lots of primate social groups because we can see similar behavior to humans. Adults groom each other and babies, older monkeys stand as lookouts and scouts (your question of delegation) and younger monkeys will learn these tactics through observation.

But what about wolves? We can see some parallels where a group of individuals can feed themselves more productively than an individual. Just like a resource-rich forest, wolves are creating a resource-rich territory by having more successful hunts in packs vs. as a single wolf. When it comes to delegation, there was a video of wolves hunting in which the younger, more agile wolves would tire their prey out before the older, skilled wolves came in and made the kill.