Multilevel societies: different tasks at different social levels

Multilevel vertebrate societies, characterised by nested social units, allow individuals to perform a wide range of tasks in cooperation with others beyond their core social unit. In these societies, individuals can selectively interact with specific partners from higher social levels to cooperatively perform distinct tasks. Alternatively, social units of the same level can merge to form higher-level associations, enabling individuals to benefit from large social units without always maintaining a large core social unit. The reasons why multilevel sociality evolves in some systems but not in others are not well understood. We propose that this is partly due to a lack of data, especially regarding the fitness consequences of cooperation at different social levels. First, we argue that in multilevel societies individual fitness benefits should increase when performing tasks in cooperation with associates from higher social levels. Secondly, as more multilevel societies are documented across taxa, we will continue to find similar cooperative tasks performed at different social levels. By providing compelling species examples, from dolphins to fairy-wrens, we underscore that despite the diversity of multilevel social organisation, convergence in task performance across social levels will become clearer with more data. Finally, we highlight the role of multilevel sociality in buffering fluctuating environmental conditions by enabling flexible social associations to emerge according to need.