No Evidence for Male Retaliation in a Population With High Level of Extra-Pair Paternity.

Clicks: 90
ID: 282633
2025
Article Quality & Performance Metrics
Overall Quality
Not rated
Combines reader engagement with the AI quality analysis. This article has not been analysed, so there is no overall score — reader engagement is measured and shown alongside.
AI Quality Assessment
Not analyzed
Readership in this journal
Emerging

Ranked #96 of 106 articles by views in Ecology and evolution

Most read Least read

Bar heights use a square-root scale.

Mint this article as an NFT
Not yet minted

Create a permanent, verifiable on-chain record of this article on the Scimatic Network. The NFT is held in your Journament account, and you can withdraw it to your own wallet at any time.

5 SUSD one-off · no wallet required
Sign in to mint
Abstract
Extra-pair paternity (EPP) is a widespread phenomenon, as EPP has been observed in 76% of the socially monogamous bird species. Many hypotheses try to explain the evolution of infidelity. While females may participate in extra-pair copulations, for instance, to ensure the fertilisation of their eggs or to obtain potential genetic benefits for their offspring, unfaithful females face many potential costs too. As nestling provisioning is one of, if not the most energetically costly forms of parental care, the certainty of paternity hypothesis predicts that males with an unfaithful partner reduce their parental investment to avoid the fitness loss arising from rearing unrelated nestlings. We investigated the relationship between the presence and proportion of extra-pair young (EPY) and the feeding rate of the social male to reveal whether males recognise and penalise unfaithfulness. We conducted the study in a Hungarian population of collared flycatchers () where the EPP rate had been reported to be high. We cross-fostered nestlings so that each parent reared offspring from two foreign broods and none from their own. Thus, any relationship between paternal investment and paternity in the original brood of the male should be the direct consequence of the female's mating behaviour (as perceived by the male) and not the result of early maternal effects or different behaviour of extra- and within-pair offspring. We found that 63.6% of the broods contained EPY, and 23% of the nestlings were sired by extra-pair fathers. The only relationship we found was that males with larger broods fed their offspring more frequently. Neither the prevalence nor the proportion of EPY was related to the male feeding rate; thus, our results do not support the certainty of paternity hypothesis. This might be explained by the inability of the males to track their females' behaviour in a population with a high EPP rate.
Reference Key
gyarmathy2025no Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Gyarmathy, Helga; Kopena, Renáta; Kneifel, Tünde; Sarkadi, Fanni; Szöllősi, Eszter; Szász, Eszter; Török, János; Rosivall, Balázs
Journal Ecology and evolution
Year 2025
DOI
10.1002/ece3.71423
URL
Keywords
feeding frequency certainty of paternity cuckoldry extra‐pair mating mating cost paternal investment

Citations

No citations found. To add a citation, contact the admin at info@scimatic.org

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first to comment on this article.