Can social networks explain why females cheat?

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• Julia Schroeder (Imperial College London)
• Tuesday 07 November 2017, 13:00-14:00
• Part II Lecture Theatre, Department of Zoology , Downing Street, CB2 3EJ.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Rebecca Kilner.

Infidelity is common among bird species with biparental care and social monogamy, but we still do not know well why females take part in extra-pair behaviour. Males are expected to gain fitness from siring extra-pair offspring, because extra-pair fathers do not expend resources on parental care. This is, however, not the case for females who raise the resulting extra-pair young, and who may risk retaliation from their mate, and other potential costs, posing the question of why females take part in extra-pair matings. The indirect benefits hypothesis offers an explanation: by cheating, females obtain “good genes” that are better, or more compatible, for their offspring. However, this hypothesis is not well supported empirically, evidenced by two contradictory meta-analyses on the topic, and active discussion in the field. Recently suggested, novel, testable hypotheses provide a fresh perspective. These so-called non-adaptive hypotheses do not require female infidelity to be adaptive per se, but rather explain female infidelity as resulting from intra- and intersexual antagonistic pleiotropy. These hypotheses suggest sexually antagonistic pleiotropy, behavioural spill-over, and social network effects to be important. I will present results from my own long-term wild house sparrow population, and from experiments with captive sparrows.

This talk is part of the Behaviour, Ecology & Evolution Seminar Series series.

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