ReviewCold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology2015
Infanticide as sexual conflict: coevolution of male strategies and female counterstrategies.
Review in Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Revisiting Infanticide in Non-Human Primates Reveals a Similar Likelihood of Male and Female Perpetrators.American journal of primatology · 2026Pooled it
- Rebreeding of Female Mountain Lions After Litter Mortality.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Is there evidence for the Bruce effect in white-faced capuchins?Animal behaviour · 2025Article
- Strategies, costs and counter-strategies to sexual coercion.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Conditional benefits of social integration in wild female geladas.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Sexual conflict underlying external female genital mutilation in spiders: assessing whether females benefit from multiple matings.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The neurobiology of parenting and infant-evoked aggression.Physiological reviews · 2025Review
- Does kinship with the silverback matter? Intragroup social relationships of immature wild western lowland gorillas after social upheaval.Primates; journal of primatology · 2024Article
- Land-based foraging by polar bears reveals sexual conflict outside mating season.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Male-mediated early maturation unlikely to evolve via adaptive evolution.Animal behaviour · 2024Article
- Social network dynamics, infant loss, and gut microbiota composition in female Colobus vellerosus during time periods with alpha male challenges.Primates; journal of primatology · 2024Article
- Social risk to infant: The role of kin for maternal visual monitoring in Tibetan macaques.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Eviction-driven infanticide and sexually selected adoption and infanticide in a neotropical parrot.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Infant spatial relationships with adult males in a wild primate: males as mitigators or magnifiers of intergenerational effects of early adversity?bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Lethal combats in the forest among wild western gorillas.iScience · 2024Article
- Infanticide in golden snub-nosed monkeys with multilevel society.Current zoology · 2024Article
- Sexual conflict over sex-an underappreciated consequence of childbirth?Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Article
- Article
- Drop dead! Female mate avoidance in an explosively breeding frog.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Early life adversities and lifelong health outcomes: A review of the literature on large, social, long-lived nonhuman mammals.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Abstract
One of the earliest recognized forms of sexual conflict was infanticide by males, which imposes serious costs on female reproductive success. Here I review two bodies of evidence addressing coevolved strategies of males and females. The original sexual selection hypothesis arguing that infanticide improves male mating success by accelerating the return of females to fertilizable condition has been generally supported in some taxa--notably, some primates, carnivores, rodents, and cetaceans--but not in other taxa. One result of recent research has been to implicate other selective benefits of infanticide by males in various taxa from insects to birds to mammals, such as acquisition of breeding status or improvement of the female breeding condition. In some cases, however, the adaptive significance of male infanticide remains obscure. The second body of data I review is arguably the most important result of recent research: clarifying the possible female counterstrategies to infanticide. These potential counterstrategies span diverse biological systems, ranging from sexual behavior (e.g., polyandrous mating), to physiology (e.g., the Bruce effect), to individual behavior (e.g., maternal aggression), to social strategies (e.g., association with coalitionary defenders of either sex). Although much remains to be studied, these current data provide compelling evidence of sexually antagonistic coevolution surrounding the phenomenon of infanticide.
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