Behavioral Ecology Vol. 15 No. 4: 699-700
Behavioral Ecology vol. 15 no. 4 © International Society for Behavioral Ecology 2004; all rights reserved
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Synchrony, asynchrony, and temporally random mating: a new method for analyzing breeding synchrony
a Project Seahorse, Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, 2204 Main Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada, and b PO Box 84, Ecology & Entomology Group, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand.
Address correspondence to D. Marsden, who is now at the Fisheries Economics Research Unit, Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, 2204 Main Mall, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z4, Canada. Email address: d.marsden@fisheries.ubc.ca. K. Evans is now at the BIOME Group, Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, Sheffield University, S10 2TN, UK
Received 6 January 2003; revised 3 September 2003; accepted 28 September 2003.
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Much research has focused on understanding breeding synchrony in animals and its relationship to such issues as mating systems and extrapair copulations in birds (Birkhead and Biggins, 1987
; Emlen and Oring, 1977; Knowlton, 1979; Stutchbury and Morton, 1995). To empirically examine synchrony, one needs an appropriate measure of the degree of synchrony in a population. Kempenaers (1993) presented an index of breeding synchrony (modified from Björklund and Westman, 1986) that has gained wide use as a simple representation of the degree to which breeding is synchronized among animals. This synchrony index (SI) is calculated as follows:
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