Leedale, Amy E. and Simeoni, Michelle and Sharp, Stuart P. and Green, Jonathan P. and Slate, Jon and Lachlan, Robert F. and Robinson, Elva J. H. and Hatchwell, Ben J. (2020) Cost, risk, and avoidance of inbreeding in a cooperatively breeding bird. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117 (27). pp. 15724-15730. ISSN 0027-8424
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Abstract
Inbreeding is often avoided in natural populations by passive processes such as sex-biased dispersal. But, in many social animals, opposite-sexed adult relatives are spatially clustered, generating a risk of incest and hence selection for active inbreeding avoidance. Here we show that, in long-tailed tits (Aegithalos caudatus), a cooperative breeder that risks inbreeding by living alongside opposite-sex relatives, inbreeding carries fitness costs and is avoided by active kin discrimination during mate choice. First, we identified a positive association between heterozygosity and fitness, indicating that inbreeding is costly. We then compared relatedness within breeding pairs to that expected under multiple mate-choice models, finding that pair relatedness is consistent with avoidance of first-order kin as partners. Finally, we show that the similarity of vocal cues offers a plausible mechanism for discrimination against first-order kin during mate choice. Long-tailed tits are known to discriminate between the calls of close kin and nonkin, and they favor first-order kin in cooperative contexts, so we conclude that long-tailed tits use the same kin discrimination rule to avoid inbreeding as they do to direct help toward kin.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information and Comments: | The final, published version of the article is available from: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/27/15724 |
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Human and Digital Sciences > School of Health and Sport Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Amy Leedale |
| Date Deposited: | 18 Aug 2021 13:24 |
| Last Modified: | 14 Jan 2025 10:07 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3341 |
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