ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
On some genetic consequences of social structure, mating systems, dispersal, and sampling.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 111 citations in OpenAlex.
- Agriculture affects genetic diversity and functional connectivity in an ecologically flexible West African primate.Heredity · 2026Article
- Inbreeding in a Fission-Fusion Equid Decreases Following an Increase in the Number and Redistribution of Water Sources.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Resource management as a conservation tool to impact genetic diversity through mating patterns in wild populations.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2026Article
- Q&A: inbreeding and its implications for conservation.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Effects of Social Structure on Effective Population Size Change Estimates.Evolutionary applications · 2025Article
- Genomic Reconstruction of the Successful Establishment of a Feralized Bovine Population on the Subantarctic Island of Amsterdam.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Relatedness-based mate choice and female philopatry: inbreeding trends of wolf packs in a human-dominated landscape.Heredity · 2024Article
- African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) from the Kruger National Park, South Africa are currently not inbred but have low genomic diversity.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Searching for genetic evidence of demographic decline in an arctic seabird: beware of overlapping generations.Heredity · 2022Article
- Impact of model assumptions on demographic inferences: the case study of two sympatric mouse lemurs in northwestern Madagascar.BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Spatially explicit paleogenomic simulations support cohabitation with limited admixture between Bronze Age Central European populations.Communications biology · 2021Article
- How the west was won: genetic reconstruction of rapid wolf recolonization into Germany's anthropogenic landscapes.Heredity · 2021Article
- Untangling the influence of biotic and abiotic factors on habitat selection by a tropical rodent.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Harvest is associated with the disruption of social and fine-scale genetic structure among matrilines of a solitary large carnivore.Evolutionary applications · 2021Article
- Comparative genomic analysis of sifakas (Science advances · 2021Article
- Article
- Gene Flow in Volant Vertebrates: Species Biology, Ecology and Climate Change.Journal of the Indian Institute of Science · 2021Review
- Article
- Bats use social information within and across species.The Journal of animal ecology · 2019Article
- The genetic relatedness of a peri-urban population of eastern grey kangaroos.BMC research notes · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many species are spatially and socially organized, with complex social organizations and dispersal patterns that are increasingly documented. Social species typically consist of small age-structured units, where a limited number of individuals monopolize reproduction and exhibit complex mating strategies. Here, we model social groups as age-structured units and investigate the genetic consequences of social structure under distinct mating strategies commonly found in mammals. Our results show that sociality maximizes genotypic diversity, which contradicts the belief that social groups are necessarily subject to strong genetic drift and at high risk of inbreeding depression. Social structure generates an excess of genotypic diversity. This is commonly observed in ecological studies but rarely reported in population genetic studies that ignore social structure. This heterozygosity excess, when detected, is often interpreted as a consequence of inbreeding avoidance mechanisms, but we show that it can occur even in the absence of such mechanisms. Many seemly contradictory results from ecology and population genetics can be reconciled by genetic models that include the complexities of social species. We find that such discrepancies can be explained by the intrinsic properties of social groups and by the sampling strategies of real populations. In particular, the number of social groups and the nature of the individuals that compose samples (e.g., nonreproductive and reproductive individuals) are key factors in generating outbreeding signatures. Sociality is an important component of population structure that needs to be revisited by ecologists and population geneticists alike.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.