RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Increased opposite sex association is linked with fitness benefits, otherwise sociality is subject to stabilising selection in a wild passerine
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2022.01.04.474937
DO 10.1101/2022.01.04.474937
A1 Jamie Dunning
A1 Terry Burke
A1 Alex Hoi Hang Chan
A1 Heung Ying Janet Chik
A1 Tim Evans
A1 Julia Schroeder
YR 2022
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/01/05/2022.01.04.474937.abstract
AB Animal sociality, an individual’s propensity to association with others, has consequences for fitness, and particularly mate choice. For example, directly, by increasing the pool of prospective partners, and indirectly through increased survival. Individuals benefit from both over the short-term as these benefits are associated with mating status and subsequent fecundity, but whether animal sociality also translates into fitness is unknown. Here, we quantified social associations and their link with annual and lifetime fitness, measured as the number of recruits and in de-lifed fitness. We measured this in birds visiting a feeding station over two non-breeding periods, using social network analysis and a multi-generational genetic pedigree. We find high individual repeatability in sociality. We found that individuals with an average sociality had the highest fitness, and that birds with more opposite-sex associates had higher fitness, but this did not translate to improved lifetime fitness. For lifetime fitness, we found evidence for stabilizing selection on between sex sociality measures, suggesting that such benefits are only short-lived in a wild population.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.