Kümmerli R Ross-Gillespie A 2014 Over the past decade, there has been enormous interest in understanding the great diversity of microbial cooperative behaviors, including communication, group-based swarming, fruiting-body formation, and the secretion of group-beneficial enzymes and food-scavenging molecules. Zhang and Rainey, henceforth Z&R, recently contended that sociomicrobiologists have been overzealous in their casting of microbes as inherently social organisms, and too hasty in interpreting microbial behaviors in a social evolutionary framework. This challenge accompanied a set of experiments in which they revisited one of the best-studied social behaviors in bacteria-the production of diffusible, sharable iron-scavenging siderophore molecules. Z&R posit that their findings challenge the view that siderophore production is a cooperative trait. Here, we demonstrate that their arguments are flawed, and stem from both technical mistakes and misunderstandings of social evolution theory. application/pdf https://sonar.ch/global/documents/50559 eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1111/evo.12311 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/pmid/24219572 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Evolution; international journal of organic evolution. - 2014 Cheating environmental conditions maladaptation public goods cooperation siderophore social evolution theory Biological Evolution Oligopeptides Pseudomonas Explaining the sociobiology of pyoverdin producing Pseudomonas: a comment on Zhang and Rainey (2013). http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501