According to classical parental care theory males are expected to provide less parental care when offspring in a brood are less likely to be their own, but empirical evidence in support of this relationship is equivocal. Recent work predicts that social interactions between the sexes can modify co-evolution between traits involved in mating and parental care as a result of costs associated with...

Japanese macaques reside in large, mixed-sex social groups in which various reproductive strategies of both sexes operate simultaneously. This report represents the first study combining behavioural and genetic data to examine the interaction of male and female reproductive strategies in primates (N=15 adult males, N=15 adult females, Yakushima Island, Japan). During one mating season, socially...

Recent federal legislation requires states to make substantial improvements in paternity establishment, enact numeric child support standards for determining child support awards, update those awards at least every three years, and adopt routine income withholding of all child support obligations. Data gathered for the purpose of evaluating the Wisconsin Child Support Assurance System make it p...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Flexistyly is a sexual dimorphism where there are two morphs that differ in the temporal expression of sexual function and also involve reciprocal movement of the stigmatic surface through a vertical axis during the flowering period. The adaptive significance of flexistyly has been interpreted as a floral mechanism for outcrossing, but it may also function to reduce sexual i...

BACKGROUND The rate of extrapair paternity is a commonly used index for the risk of sperm competition in birds, but paternity data exist for only a few percent of the approximately 10400 extant species. As paternity analyses require extensive field sampling and costly lab work, species coverage in this field will probably not improve much in the foreseeable future. Recent findings from passerin...

Post-pollination processes can lead to nonrandom mating among compatible pollen donors. Moreover, morphological patterns of ovule development within linear fruits are reportedly nonrandom and depend on ovule position. However, little is known about the relationship between nonrandom mating and ovule position within linear fruit. Here, we combined controlled pollen competition experiments and pa...

In a number of primate species, females utter loud and distinctive calls during mating. Here we aim to clarify the information content and function of Barbary macaque (Macaca sylvanus) copulation calls by testing (i) whether or not copulation calls advertise the female fertile phase and (ii) whether and how copulation calls influence male ejaculatory behaviour. In order to do this, we combined ...