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Publications
Publications (161)
In long‐lived monogamous species, the trigger of costly re‐pairing is not always clear. Limited research suggests that within‐pair behavioural compatibility may be an important driver of partnership success, as cooperation should be enhanced when pair members' decisions complement one another. Animals' decision‐making processes are influenced by pe...
To maximise fitness, parents should optimise their investment in each breeding attempt. When there are multiple carers, the optimal strategy may also depend on the relative timing of their investment, with coordination of care hypothesised to maximise its efficiency and reduce predation risk. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that ca...
Long-lived monogamous species gain long-term fitness benefits by equalizing effort during biparental care. For example, many seabird species coordinate care by matching foraging trip durations within pairs. Age affects coordination in some seabird species; however, the impact of other intrinsic traits, including personality, on potential intraspeci...
Cooperative breeding sometimes occurs when adult breeders form groups following natal dispersal and mating. In such cases, individuals typically face a choice of social partner with whom to cooperate. Selecting appropriate social partners is crucial to maximising the fitness payoffs from cooperation, but our understanding of the criteria guiding pa...
Alloparental care in cooperatively breeding species may alter breeder age‐specific survival and reproduction and subsequently senescence. The helping behaviour itself might also undergo age‐related change, and decisions to help in facultative cooperative breeders are likely to be affected by individual condition.
Helpers in long‐tailed tits Aegitha...
Home-range size is a key aspect of space-use, and variation in home-range size and structure may have profound consequences for the potential impact of damage and control strategies for invasive species. However, knowledge on home-range structure of naturalized parrot species is very limited. The aim of this study was to quantify patterns of home-r...
Data on home-range size of 73 Monk parakeets in Barcelona city
The genetic structure of animal populations has considerable behavioural, ecological and evolutionary implications and may arise from various demographic traits. Here, we use observational field data and molecular genetics to determine the genetic structure of an invasive population of monk parakeets, Myiopsitta monachus, at a range of spatial scal...
Significance
Inbreeding reduces fitness leading to selection for incest avoidance in many organisms. Passive processes, such as sex-biased dispersal, may reduce inbreeding risk, but when dispersal is limited, inbreeding may still be minimized by animals actively recognizing and discriminating kin from nonkin when choosing mates. We investigated inb...
Most cooperative breeders live in discrete family groups, but in a minority, breeding populations comprise extended social networks of conspecifics that vary in relatedness. Selection for effective kin recognition may be expected for more related individuals in such kin neighbourhoods to maximize indirect fitness. Using a long-term social pedigree,...
Most cooperative breeders live in discrete family groups, but in a minority, breeding populations comprise extended social networks of conspecifics that vary in relatedness. Selection for effective kin recognition may be expected for more related individuals in such kin neighbourhoods to maximize indirect fitness. Using a long-term social pedigree,...
Interacting with relatives provides opportunities for fitness benefits via kin-selected cooperation, but also creates potential costs through kin competition and inbreeding. Therefore, a mechanism for the discrimination of kin from non-kin is likely to be critical for individuals of many social species to maximize their inclusive fitness. Evidence...
Invasive species can have wide-ranging negative impacts, and an understanding of the process and success of invasions can be vital to determine management strategies, mitigate impacts and predict range expansions of such species. Monk parakeets (Myiopsitta monachus) and ring-necked parakeets (Psittacula krameri) are both widespread invasive species...
Animal dispersal patterns have important implications for many biological processes, but the measurement of dispersal is challenging and often requires the use of complementary approaches. In this study, we investigated the local-scale sex-biased dispersal pattern in a social bird, the black-throated tit (Aegithalos concinnus), in central China. Sp...
Animal dispersal patterns have important implications for many biological processes, but the measurement of dispersal is challenging and often requires the use of complementary approaches. In this study, we investigated the local-scale sex-biased dispersal pattern in a social bird, the black-throated tit (Aegithalos concinnus), in central China. Sp...
Riflemen/tītipounamu (Acanthisitta chloris) are kin-based cooperatively breeding birds, which appear able to recognise their relatives. Here, we investigate the potential for vocalisations to act as recognition cues in riflemen. We identified an appropriate contact call and recorded it at the nest from 19 adult riflemen. Measurements of call charac...
Significance
How far individuals disperse from their birth site has profound consequences for the genetic structure of populations and for individual fitness, affecting the degree of gene flow between populations and the extent to which relatives and nonrelatives interact socially. Spatial clustering of kin arising from limited dispersal facilitate...
Evolutionary theory predicts that parents should invest equally in the two sexes. If one sex is more costly, a production bias is predicted in favour of the other. Two well-studied causes of differential costs are size dimorphism, in which the larger sex should be more costly, and sex-biased helping in cooperative breeders, in which the more helpfu...
Data from: Fine-scale genetic structure and helping decisions in a cooperatively breeding bird
In animal societies, characteristic demographic and dispersal patterns may lead to genetic structuring of populations, generating the potential for kin selection to operate. However, even in genetically structured populations, social interactions may still require kin discrimination for cooperative behaviour to be directed towards relatives. Here,...
The repayment hypothesis predicts that reproductive females in cooperative breeding systems overproduce the helping sex. Thanks to well-documented examples of this predicted sex ratio bias, repayment has been considered an important driver of variation in sex allocation patterns. Here we test this hypothesis using data on population brood sex ratio...
Parental care strategies occupy a continuum from fixed investments that are consistent across contexts to flexible behaviour that largely depends on external social and environmental cues. Determining the flexibility of care behaviour is important, as it influences the outcome of investment games between multiple individuals caring for the same bro...
Kin selection is regarded as a key process in the evolution of avian cooperative breeding, and kinship influences helper decisions in many species. However, the effect of kinship on nonbreeding social organization is still poorly understood despite its potential fitness implications. Here, we investigated the origins and consequences of kin associa...
Investment by helpers in cooperative breeding systems is extremely variable among species, but this variation is currently unexplained. Inclusive fitness theory predicts that, all else being equal, cooperative investment should correlate positively with the relatedness of helpers to the recipients of their care. We test this prediction in a compara...
There is large interspecific variation in the magnitude of population fluctuations, even among closely related species. The factors generating this variation are not well understood, primarily because of the challenges of separating the relative impact of variation in population size from fluctuations in the environment. Here, we show using demogra...
Supplementary Figures 1-4, Supplementary Table 1 and Supplementary Note 1
Indirect fitness benefits gained through kin-selected helping are widely invoked to explain the evolution of cooperative breeding
behavior in birds. However, the impact of helpers on productivity of helped broods can be difficult to determine if the effects
are confounded by territory quality or if the benefit of helpers is apparent only in the lon...
In species with biparental care, there is sexual conflict over parental investment because each parent benefits when their
partner bears more of the reproductive costs. Such conflict can be costly for offspring, but recent theoretical work predicts
that parents can resolve sexual conflict through behavioral negotiation, specifically by alternating...
Traits used in communication, such as colour signals, are expected to have positive consequences for reproductive success, but their associations with survival are little understood. Previous studies have mainly investigated linear relationships between signals and survival, but both hump-shaped and U-shaped relationships can also be predicted, dep...
Dispersal is a critical driver of gene flow, with important consequences for population genetic structure, social interactions and other biological processes. Limited dispersal may result in kin-structured populations in which kin selection may operate, but it may also increase the risk of kin competition and inbreeding. Here, we use a combination...
Phenotypes expressed in a social context are not only a function of the individual, but can also be shaped by the phenotypes of social partners. These social effects may play a major role in the evolution of cooperative breeding if social partners differ in the quality of care they provide and if individual carers adjust their effort in relation to...
Cooperative breeding typically evolves within discrete, stable groups of individuals, in which group members derive direct and/or indirect fitness benefits from cooperative behaviour. In such systems, strong selection on group discrimination should emerge. Despite this prediction, relatively few studies have investigated the mechanism of group disc...
Cooperatively breeding species are typically long lived and hence, according to theory, are expected to maximize their lifetime reproductive success through maximizing survival. Under these circumstances, the presence of helpers could be used to lighten the effort of current reproduction for parents to achieve higher survival.
In addition, individu...
Productivity is a key demographic trait that can be influenced by climate change, but there are substantial gaps in our understanding of the impact of weather on productivity and recruitment in birds. Weather is known to influence reproductive success in numerous species, although such effects have not been reported in all studies, perhaps because...
The tragedy of the commons predicts social collapse when public goods are jointly exploited by individuals attempting to maximize their fitness at the expense of other social group members. However, animal societies have evolved many times despite this vulnerability to exploitation by selfish individuals. Kin selection offers a solution to this soc...
Inclusive fitness theory provides the conceptual framework for our current understanding of social evolution, and empirical studies suggest that kin selection is a critical process in the evolution of animal sociality. A key prediction of inclusive fitness theory is that altruistic behaviour evolves when the costs incurred by an altruist (c) are ou...
Inclusive fitness theory provides the conceptual framework for our current understanding of social evolution, and empirical studies suggest that kin selection is a critical process in the evolution of animal sociality. A key prediction of inclusive fitness theory is that altruistic behaviour evolves when the costs incurred by an altruist (c) are ou...
Predicting climate change impacts on population size requires detailed understanding of how climate influences key demographic rates, such as survival. This knowledge is frequently unavailable, even in well-studied taxa such as birds. In temperate regions, most research into climatic effects on annual survival in resident passerines has focussed on...
Kin selection has played an important role in the evolution and maintenance of cooperative breeding behaviour in many bird species. However, although relatedness has been shown to affect the investment decisions of helpers in such systems, less is known about the role that kin discrimination plays in other contexts, such as communal roosting. Indiv...
The social organization of cooperatively breeding species is extremely variable, with diverse social group composition and patterns of relatedness. Species that exhibit alternative routes to helping within the same population are potentially useful systems to investigate the causes and fitness consequences of diverse evolutionary pathways to cooper...
Climate change-induced shifts in phenology have important demographic consequences, and are frequently used to assess species' sensitivity to climate change. Therefore, developing accurate phenological predictions is an important step in modeling species' responses to climate change. The ability of such phenological models to predict effects at lar...
Thirty-seven unique polymorphic microsatellite loci were characterised in 24 unrelated rifleman individuals (Acanthisitta chloris) sampled from a population located at Kowhai Bush, Kaikoura, New Zealand. Thirty of these loci were newly isolated from a rifleman genomic library enriched for microsatellite motifs, and seven were identified from the te...
Successful urban colonization by formerly rural species represents an ideal situation in which to study adaptation to novel environments. We address this issue using candidate genes for behavioural traits that are expected to play a role in such colonization events. We identified and genotyped 16 polymorphisms in candidate genes for circadian rhyth...
Structures built by animals, such as nests, mounds and burrows, are often the product of cooperative investment by more than one individual. Such structures may be viewed as a public good, since all individuals that occupy them share the benefits they provide. However, access to the benefits generated by the structure may vary among individuals and...
The evolution of cooperation is a persistent problem for evolutionary biologists. In particular, understanding of the factors that promote the expression of helping behaviour in cooperatively breeding species remains weak, presumably because of the diverse nature of ecological and demographic drivers that promote sociality.
In this study, we use da...
The population of common guillemots Uria aalge on Skomer Island, Wales has been monitored since 1963, and in the last 30 yr has increased at an almost constant rate of 5% yr -1 . A previous attempt to model the population based on intrinsic demographic parameters estimated over just five years failed to explain the observed population increase, pro...
Maternal effects can influence offspring phenotype with short- and long-term consequences. Yet, how the social environment may influence egg composition is not well understood. Here, we investigate how laying order and social environment predict maternal effects in the sociable weaver, Philetairus socius, a species that lives in massive communal ne...
How individuals colonising novel environments overcome the diverse suite of new selection pressures is a fundamental question in ecology and evolution. Urban environments differ markedly from the rural ones that they replace and successful colonisation of urban areas may therefore require local adaptation and phenotypic/genetic divergence from ance...
In animal societies, kin selection is a critical evolutionary process, with cooperation evolving principally among relatives living in kin-structured populations. Theoretical and empirical studies have largely focused on population viscosity--the timing or distance of dispersal--as the key factor generating kin structure. This is despite extensive...
A growing number of bird species are known to have fine-scale genetic structure during the breeding season, with relatives breeding in close vicinity. Such genetic structure often has fitness consequences for parents, and sex ratio theory predicts that females should respond adaptively when they determine offspring sex. We examined whether or not f...
In cooperatively breeding vertebrates, investment strategies of breeders and helpers may be affected by the sex of offspring that they provision because the fitness benefits gained from caring for sons or daughters will depend upon the fitness impacts of positive (i.e. local resource enhancement) and negative (i.e. local resource competition) socia...
Theoretical modelling of biparental care suggests that it can be a stable strategy if parents partially compensate for changes in behaviour by their partners. In empirical studies, however, parents occasionally match rather than compensate for the actions of their partners. The recently proposed "information model" adds to the earlier theory by fac...
The black throat patch or bib of male house sparrows, Passer domesticus, is often referred to as a ''badge of status'' or a ''badge'' because previous studies have shown bib size to be correlated with the social status of males. Yet, little is known about how strong and robust this relationship is and how the strength of this relationship compares...
Cooperative breeding has evolved primarily in species in which individuals are organized into family groups, and kin selection is considered to be a major force in the evolution of helping behaviour. Family groups are generally thought to form through delayed or limited dispersal, but dispersal patterns vary considerably both between species and in...
Arising from M. A. Nowak, C. E. Tarnita & E. O. Wilson 466, 1057-1062 (2010); Nowak et al. reply. Nowak et al. argue that inclusive fitness theory has been of little value in explaining the natural world, and that it has led to negligible progress in explaining the evolution of eusociality. However, we believe that their arguments are based upon a...
The prevalence and ecology of the haematozoan parasites of a rural population of European blackbirds, Turdus merula, were investigated. Parasites belonging to eight species from four genera (Leucocytozoon, Plasmodium, Haemoproteus, and Trypanosoma) were identified. Prevalence was high: 83% of adults and 80% of juveniles were infected by at least on...
In cooperatively breeding species, the fitness consequences of producing sons or daughters depend upon the fitness impacts of positive (repayment hypothesis) and negative (local competition hypothesis) social interactions among relatives. In this study, we examine brood sex allocation in relation to the predictions of both the repayment and the loc...
Urban development is increasing across the globe. This poses a major threat to biodiversity, which is often relatively poor in towns and cities. Despite much interest in identifying species' traits that can predict their responses to environmental degradation this approach has seldom been used to assess which species are particularly vulnerable to...
Helpers in cooperatively breeding species may gain direct fitness benefits that increase their survival probability and/or reproductive success. However, survival and productivity may be influenced by many other factors, including variation in dispersal, nepotistic interactions, or individual condition. High helper survival relative to nonhelpers h...
Despite increasing interest in urban ecology the factors limiting the colonisation of towns and cities by species from rural areas are poorly understood. This is largely due to the lack of a detailed conceptual framework for this urbanisation process, and of sufficient case studies. Here, we develop such a framework. This draws upon a wide range of...