When a parent's parentage differs across breeding attempts, established theory predicts that the parent should invest more in a brood when perceived parentage is high. We present a model of parental investment in which offspring unrelated to the parent have a competitive advantage over the parent's own offspring and take a larger share of investment. We show that this can weaken or, if the comp...

Zoo-based captive breeding programs typically rely on accurate pedigrees to maintain long-term population genetic diversity and prevent close inbreeding. For many mixed-sex captive populations, it is difficult to assign parentage of offspring with certainty without conducting DNA-based parentage analyses. Using the demographic parameters of a North American captive population of Arabian oryx (O...

For identification of individuals and parentage control performed by cattle breeders in the Czech Republic, a novel Finnish Bovine Genotypes™ Panel 3.1was amplified by means of one multiplex polymerase chain reaction. Bovine Panel encompasses all the 12 STR loci recommended by the International Society for Animal Genetics (ISAG) for routine use in parentage testing and identification, including...

The formulae for computing the so-called Sib Index using codominant alleles for (1) full-sib and (2) half-sib parentage are given. Hypothesis testing is based on the distribution of conditional likelihood ratio or Bayes' factor. Thresholds for rejecting the null hypothesis and P-values were obtained in function of the number of alleles and their frequency distributions. Simulations showed that ...

Despite the interest that avian brood parasites provoke due to their reproductive strategy, and the wealth of published studies, their mating system is one of the least known aspects of their natural history. This study describes the first attempt to use genetics to characterize mating patterns in a brood parasite, the great spotted cuckoo (Clamator glandarius). We developed a set of microsatel...

BACKGROUND Polyandry is widespread throughout the animal kingdom. In the absence of direct benefits of mating with different males, the underlying basis for polyandry is enigmatic because it can carry considerable costs such as elevated exposure to sexual diseases, physical injury or other direct fitness costs. Such costs may be balanced by indirect genetic benefits to the offspring of polyandr...

Affiliations 1. Phone: +61 4 14 108 439. CC-BY 4.0 International license not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was. Abstract Dispersal kernels are the standard method for describing and predicting the relationship between dispersal strength and distance. Statistically-fitted dispersal kernels allow observations of a l...

Mutual policing is an important mechanism that maintains social harmony in group-living organisms by suppressing the selfish behavior of individuals. In social insects, workers police one another (worker-policing) by preventing individual workers from laying eggs that would otherwise develop into males. Within the framework of Hamilton's rule there are two explanations for worker-policing behav...