ArticleBiology letters2016
The cost of prospecting for dispersal opportunities in a social bird.
Article in Biology letters, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- How Prospecting for Informed Dispersal Shapes Biodiversity Patterns in a Metacommunity.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Social Structure and Interactions Differentially Shape Aerotolerant and Anaerobic Gut Microbiomes in a Cooperative Breeding Species.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Gut microbiome communities demonstrate fine-scale spatial variation in a closed, island bird population.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Causes and consequences of divorce in a long-lived socially monogamous bird.Ecology letters · 2024Article
- Evolution of sex differences in cooperation can be explained by trade-offs with dispersal.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Fitness consequences of outgroup conflict.eLife · 2022Review
- Seychelles warblers with silver spoons: Juvenile body mass is a lifelong predictor of annual survival, but not annual reproduction or senescence.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Early-life conditions impact juvenile telomere length, but do not predict later life-history strategies or fitness in a wild vertebrate.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- The contribution of extra-pair paternity to the variation in lifetime and age-specific male reproductive success in a socially monogamous species.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Hematocrit, age, and survival in a wild vertebrate population.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Exploitative leaders incite intergroup warfare in a social mammal.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Breeders that receive help age more slowly in a cooperatively breeding bird.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Kinship and familiarity mitigate costs of social conflict between Seychelles warbler neighbors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Adult sex ratios and their implications for cooperative breeding in birds.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Review
- Delayed dispersal and the costs and benefits of different routes to independent breeding in a cooperatively breeding bird.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2016Article
- Repeatable and heritable behavioural variation in a wild cooperative breeder.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Understanding why individuals delay dispersal and become subordinates within a group is central to studying the evolution of sociality. Hypotheses predict that dispersal decisions are influenced by costs of extra-territorial prospecting that are often required to find a breeding vacancy. Little is known about such costs, partly because it is complicated to demonstrate them empirically. For example, prospecting individuals may be of inferior quality already before prospecting and/or have been evicted. Moreover, costs of prospecting are mainly studied in species where prospectors suffer from predation risk, so how costly prospecting is when predators are absent remains unclear. Here, we determine a cost of prospecting for subordinate Seychelles warblers, Acrocephalus sechellensis, in a population where predators are absent and individuals return to their resident territory after prospecting. Prospecting individuals had 5.2% lower body mass than non-prospecting individuals. Our evidence suggests this may be owing to frequent attacks by resident conspecifics, likely leading to reduced food intake by prospectors. These results support the hypothesis that energetic costs associated with dispersal opportunities are one factor influencing dispersal decisions and shaping the evolution of delayed dispersal in social animals.
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