PIERRE JOUVENTIN, 1 * ANNE CHARMANTIER, 2 MARIE-PIERRE DUBOIS, 1 PHILIPPE JARNE 1 & JOËL BRIED 3 1 Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive, UMR CNRS 5175, 1919 route de Mende, 34293 Montpellier Cedex 5, France 2 Edward Grey Institute, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK 3 Departamento de Oceanografia e Pescas, Centro do IMAR da Universidade dos...

Genetic data collected on co-operatively breeding Neolamprologus pulcher groups from Lake Tanganyika revealed mixed parentage in 80% of the groups examined. A case (1/11) of shared maternity was detected where a subordinate female bred alongside the dominant female in a social group. Extra-pair paternity was assigned to other dominant males who held their own social groups, but subordinate male...

In environments in which female economic dependence on a male mate is higher, male parental investment is more essential. In such environments, therefore, both sexes should value paternity certainty more and thus object more to promiscuity (because promiscuity undermines paternity certainty). We tested this theory of anti-promiscuity morality in two studies (N = 656 and N = 4,626) using U.S. sa...

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Evolutionary theory suggests that maternal grandparents will invest more in their grandchildren than paternal grandparents, due to the difference between the certainty of maternity and the uncertainty of paternity. Most tests of this prediction have tended to use retrospective ratings by grandchildren rather than examining grandparental behaviour. Using a large-scale data set from the UK (n>700...

We provide field-based experimental evidence for the frequency-dependent nature of the fitness of alternative mating strategies. We manipulated the frequency of genetically determined phenotypic strategies in six wild populations of the side-blotched lizard, Uta stansburiana. The within-population pattern of mating was assessed using nine microsatellite loci to assign paternity. Within populati...

Lekking males compete for females within and among leks, yet female choice is expected to work differently at each of these spatial scales. We used paternity analyses to examine how lek versus male attributes influence mate choice in the blue-crowned manakin Lepidothrix coronata. We tested the hypotheses that females prefer (i) to mate at larger leks where a larger number of potential mates can...

The aim of this study was to evaluate whether the Goldeneye 20A system (containing 19 short tandem repeats) can avert the shortage of duo parentage tests. Among routine cases typed by the Identifiler system, we identified 42 motherless cases, 2 fatherless cases, and 34 trio cases containing 1 locus mismatch and 4 motherless cases with 2 locus mismatches. One true trio case was rejected by fathe...

We describe an efficient algorithm for determining exactly the minimum number of sires consistent with the multi-locus genotypes of a mother and her progeny. We consider cases where a simple exhaustive search through all possible sets of sires is impossible in practice because it would take too long to complete. Our algorithm for solving this combinatorial optimization problem avoids visiting l...