Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on October 13, 2006
Behavioral Ecology 2007 18(1):157-164; doi:10.1093/beheco/arl062
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No evidence for inbreeding avoidance in a great reed warbler population
a Department of Animal Ecology, Lund University, Ecology Building, S-223 62 Lund, Sweden b Institute of Evolutionary Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, West Mains Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JT, UK c Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6, Canada d Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK
Address correspondence to B. Hansson. E-mail: bengt.hansson{at}zooekol.lu.se. L. Jack is now at Department of Marine Science, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand.
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Abstract |
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Inbreeding depression may drive the evolution of inbreeding avoidance through dispersal and mate choice. In birds, many species show female-biased dispersal, which is an effective inbreeding avoidance mechanism. In contrast, there is scarce evidence in birds for kin discriminative mate choice, which may, at least partly, reflect difficulties detecting it. First, kin discrimination may be realized as dispersal, and this is difficult to distinguish from other causes of dispersal. Second, even within small, isolated populations, it is often difficult to determine the potential candidates available to a female when choosing a mate. We sought evidence for inbreeding avoidance via kin discrimination in a breeding population of great reed warblers (Acrocephalus arundinaceus) studied over 17 years. Inbreeding depression is strong in the population, suggesting that it would be adaptive to avoid relatives as mates. Detailed data on timing of settlement and mate search movements made it possible to identify candidate mates for each female, and long-term pedigrees and resolved parentage enabled us to estimate relatedness between females and their candidate mates. We found no evidence for kin discrimination: mate choice was random with respect to relatedness when all mate-choice events were considered, and, after correction for multiple tests, also in all breeding years. We suggest that dispersal is a sufficient inbreeding avoidance mechanism in most situations, although the lack of kin discriminative mate choice has negative consequences for some females, because they end up mating with closely related males that lowers their fitness.
Key words: dispersal, inbreeding avoidance, inbreeding depression, kin recognition, pedigree, relatedness.
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