ArticleScientific reports2018
Male age is associated with extra-pair paternity, but not with extra-pair mating behaviour.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Strategies, costs and counter-strategies to sexual coercion.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Post-copulatory competition in a social monogamy system: Sperm morphology correlates with components of reproductive success.PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
- Evidence of Paternal Effects on Telomere Length Increases in Early Life.Frontiers in genetics · 2022Article
- When Older Males Sire More Offspring-Increased Attractiveness or Higher Fertility?Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2022Article
- Male survivorship and the evolution of eusociality in partially bivoltine sweat bees.PloS one · 2022Article
- Temporal dynamics of competitive fertilization in social groups of red junglefowl (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Sperm Morphology and Male Age in Black-Throated Blue Warblers, an Ecological Model System.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2020Article
- Male age and its association with reproductive traits in captive and wild house sparrows.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2019Article
- Mature sperm small-RNA profile in the sparrow: implications for transgenerational effects of age on fitness.Environmental epigenetics · 2019Article
- Opposite-sex associations are linked with annual fitness, but sociality is stable over lifetime.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
- Analysis of within-individual variation in extrapair paternity in blue tits (Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Extra-pair paternity is the result of copulation between a female and a male other than her social partner. In socially monogamous birds, old males are most likely to sire extra-pair offspring. The male manipulation and female choice hypotheses predict that age-specific male mating behaviour could explain this old-over-young male advantage. These hypotheses have been difficult to test because copulations and the individuals involved are hard to observe. Here, we studied the mating behaviour and pairing contexts of captive house sparrows, Passer domesticus. Our set-up mimicked the complex social environment experienced by wild house sparrows. We found that middle-aged males, which would be considered old in natural populations, gained most extra-pair paternity. However, both, female solicitation behaviour and subsequent extra-pair matings were not associated with male age. Further, copulations were more likely when solicited by females than when initiated by males (i.e. unsolicited copulations). Male initiated within-pair copulations were more common than male initiated extra-pair copulations. To conclude, our results did not support either hypothesis regarding age-specific male mating behaviour. Instead, female choice, independent of male age, governed copulation success, especially in an extra-pair context. Post-copulatory mechanisms might determine why older males sire more extra-pair offspring.
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