Inbreeding causes early death in a passerine bird

Hemmings, Nicola; Slate, Jon; Birkhead, Tim R.

doi:10.1038/ncomms1870

Cited by 58 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…() used five microsatellites, leading the authors to conclude that a local effect was responsible, whereas the much larger panel used by Hemmings et al. () more or less precludes a dominant role for only one or two loci. Consistent with the latter study, two lines of evidence are suggestive of a genomewide mechanism in banded mongooses.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A high‐quality pedigree and genetic markers both reveal inbreeding depression for quality but not survival in a cooperative mammal

et al. 2018

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Inbreeding depression, the reduced fitness of offspring of closely related parents, is commonplace in both captive and wild populations and has important consequences for conservation and mating system evolution. However, because of the difficulty of collecting pedigree and life-history data from wild populations, relatively few studies have been able to compare inbreeding depression for traits at different points in the life cycle. Moreover, pedigrees give the expected proportion of the genome that is identical by descent (IBD ) whereas in theory with enough molecular markers realized IBD can be quantified directly. We therefore investigated inbreeding depression for multiple life-history traits in a wild population of banded mongooses using pedigree-based inbreeding coefficients (f ) and standardized multilocus heterozygosity (sMLH) measured at 35-43 microsatellites. Within an information theoretic framework, we evaluated support for either f or sMLH as inbreeding terms and used sequential regression to determine whether the residuals of sMLH on f explain fitness variation above and beyond f . We found no evidence of inbreeding depression for survival, either before or after nutritional independence. By contrast, inbreeding was negatively associated with two quality-related traits, yearling body mass and annual male reproductive success. Yearling body mass was associated with f but not sMLH, while male annual reproductive success was best explained by both f and residual sMLH. Thus, our study not only uncovers variation in the extent to which different traits show inbreeding depression, but also reveals trait-specific differences in the ability of pedigrees and molecular markers to explain fitness variation and suggests that for certain traits, genetic markers may capture variation in realized IBD above and beyond the pedigree expectation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A high‐quality pedigree and genetic markers both reveal inbreeding depression for quality but not survival in a cooperative mammal

et al. 2018

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“…These explanations seem unlikely to explain the results in our study, as females that were fed more tended to incubate longer. Second, and a more likely explanation, hatching success may also be affected by factors other than incubation, such as inbreeding (Hemmings et al 2012;Kingma et al 2013). Third, we could not record potential incubation feeding further away from the nest box due to the dense vegetation around the nest and monitoring limitations (see Nilsson and Smith 1988;Pearse et al 2004;Matysioková and Remeš 2010).…”

Section: Reproductive Performance In Relation To Female Nest Attendancementioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of male incubation feeding on female nest attendance and reproductive performance in a socially monogamous bird

et al. 2017

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The incubation of eggs plays a key role in avian parental care. To ensure embryo development, incubating parents have to keep their eggs within the appropriate temperature limits. To do so, incubating individuals allocate substantial energy to the thermal demands of their eggs, but they face a trade-off with self-maintenance (own metabolism) because they usually cannot forage while incubating eggs. In species with female-only incubation, males can help their partners by providing them with food on the nest, a behavior which may enable females to spend more time incubating and could, consequently, lead to improved reproductive performance. In the study reported here, we first investigated whether incubation feeding by males affects nest attendance by females in Blue Tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) and subsequently determined how this incubation feeding affects reproductive performance. We found that the female nest attendance tended to increase with increasing amounts of food supplied by their male partner. Thus, males may enable females to incubate more when needed, as suggested by our observation that male incubation feeding was more frequent when the ambient temperature was lower, and especially so when females incubated later in the breeding season (during the study period the ambient temperature decreased rapidly over the breeding season, which is exceptional). Although female nest attendance did not result in a shorter time until the eggs hatched or in higher hatching success, females that attended the nest more produced heavier nestlings. We suggest that the trade-off between self-maintenance and meeting the demands of egg incubation likely tends to be less when females received more assistance from their partner during the egg incubation period, resulting in a higher investment in offspring.

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“…Indeed, incompatibility effects are thought to be strongest early in development, perhaps even before hatching (e.g. Hemmings et al 2012); and blood sampling of hatched chicks, rather than all fertilized eggs, is potentially a key limitation of GCH studies in general (Reid 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

No evidence that genetic compatibility drives extra‐pair behavior in female blue‐footed boobies

Kiere¹,

Ramos²,

Drummond³

2016

Journal of Avian Biology

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The function of female birds' extra-pair (EP) behavior has remained an unresolved question in ornithology and behavioral ecology for >30 years. The genetic compatibility hypothesis (GCH) proposes that females benefit by acquiring biological sires that yield more heterozygous, and therefore fitter, offspring than their social mates. We used ten polymorphic microsatellite loci to test GCH predictions and its assumption that fitness increases with heterozygosity in blue-footed boobies (Sula nebouxii), a long-lived tropical seabird. Our predictions were not supported. Heterozygosity was uncorrelated with quality indicators (fledging probability, fledgling or adult body size or mass, adult ornamentation, mean breeding success). Females were no more likely to have EP behavior or chicks when their social mates were less heterozygous or compatible, nor were EP males more heterozygous or compatible than the males they cuckolded. Finally, EP chicks were no more heterozygous than within-pair chicks overall or in half-sib comparisons, nor were within-pair chicks from all-within-pair nests more heterozygous that those with EP nestmates. There are both methodological and biological explanations for these consistently negative results. Inadequate sample size is possible but unlikely, since our samples were comparable or larger than those of similar studies with significant findings. Lack of identity disequilibrium (within-individual heterozygosity correlation) among our marker loci could be responsible, and suggests either insufficient marker coverage or lack of inbreeding, bottleneck, and/or admixture. An independent social pedigree revealed infrequent inbreeding, suggesting that pressure on females to select sires that maximize offspring heterozygosity may be genuinely lax. Alternatively, it is possible that the GCH is only upheld when selection on young is strongest; this would not be detected in our sample, which was taken during an extremely productive year. Whatever their cause, our results Accepted Ar ticle'This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.' expand the taxonomic breadth of avian EP behavior analyses and should be considered in future evaluations of the GCH.

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Inbreeding causes early death in a passerine bird

Cited by 58 publications

References 22 publications

A high‐quality pedigree and genetic markers both reveal inbreeding depression for quality but not survival in a cooperative mammal

A high‐quality pedigree and genetic markers both reveal inbreeding depression for quality but not survival in a cooperative mammal

The effect of male incubation feeding on female nest attendance and reproductive performance in a socially monogamous bird

No evidence that genetic compatibility drives extra‐pair behavior in female blue‐footed boobies

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