What is Rescue Anyways? A Comprehensive Review of Rescue and Rescue Adjacent Behavior Across Taxa

The term “rescue behavior” refers to a special form of altruism in which an individual aids another individual currently in distress or danger, with no obvious direct benefit to itself. In this review, we develop a modified version of Nowbahari and Hollis’ (2010) rescue criteria to classify the existing literature on rescue behavior. We aim to identify what taxa perform rescue or rescue-like behaviors, and quantify the hypothesized drivers of these behaviors. We propose novel criteria for evaluating rescue in further studies, and classify the existing literature into three groups based on this modified criteria. We suggest that many behaviors are excluded from the existing literature on rescue because they are instead studied and discussed under different terminology. Thus, rescue behavior may be more common than previously thought. However, a key component of rescue is risk, which can be difficult to assess. More work is needed to integrate how we think about and assess risk, and how we define rescue behavior.