Indiscriminate polyandry and male parental effort

Abstract

Extrapair paternity involves cooperation between mated females and extrapair males. On the other hand, mated males exhibit a spectrum of anti-cuckolding strategies. Hence, extrapair attributes of diverse species and populations reported in the literature are particular solutions of evolutionary games involving gender-specific cuckolding/anti-cuckolding strategies. Here we use game theoretical methods to study the effect of male paternal effort conserving strategies in situations where females seek extrapair fertilizations (EPF) for reasons of genetic compatibility and/or in pursuit of genetic diversity for their offspring. In such cases, females cannot make a pre-copulatory selection of the optimal genetic partners, and therefore combine promiscuous copulation with the use of in copula and/or post-copulatory selection mechanisms to optimize the genetic endowment of their offspring-indiscriminate polyandry. Our results indicate that, when indiscriminate polygamy is constrained by the availability of extrapair male partners, there are three possible (parameter regime wise) evolutionary stable strategy solutions. (1). All females seek EPF, while all males restrict parental care. (2). All females seek EPF, while all males are unconditionally parental. (3). Females use a combination strategy where pursuit of EPF is mixed-on either a population, or an individual level-with genetic monogamy, while all males use a conditional paternal care strategy, which involves adjusting their parental efforts according to their certainty of paternity.

Parental conflict in birds: comparative analyses of offspring development, ecology and mating opportunities

“…Following on from this, simultaneous and sequential polygamy can differ with respect to male certainty of paternity, in that we expect certainty to be higher where females are sequentially polygamous than where either sex is simultaneously polygamous ( Valle 1994;Fishman & Stone 2006). Where males are uncertain of the paternity of the offspring of the social mate, reduced care is often the result, particularly with respect to the feeding of their young (Møller & Birkhead 1993;Whittingham & Dunn 1998;Fishman & Stone 2004; but see Whittingham & Lifjeld 1995;Yezerinac et al 1996). So, if females of altricial and precocial species differ with respect to when they are most able to remate, this may explain why, in altricial species, female care increases with levels of polyandry, while the opposite occurs in precocial species (Albrecht et al 2006).…”

Trade up polygyny and breeding synchrony in avian populations

“…Petrie and Kempenaers, 1998). As we have discussed elsewhere (Fishman and Stone, 2002;Fishman et al, 2003;Fishman and Stone, 2004), to a considerable degree this variation is interpretable in terms of the criteria that females use in choosing extrapair partners.…”

Unsupervised signal restoration using hidden Markov chains with copulas

“…The theory of copulas allows one to define the distribution pðyÞ from given marginal distributions pðy 1 Þ, y, pðy m Þ and dependence structure [1]. Firstly introduced by Sklar [2], this theory is widely used in various fields like linguistics [3], biology [4], decision sciences [5], finance and insuring [6], or still psychology [7], among others. We only mentioned recent papers, each of which contain numerous references for these different fields of research.…”