ArticlePloS one2019
No evidence for kin recognition in a passerine bird.
Article in PloS one, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- No Evidence for Male Retaliation in a Population With High Level of Extra-Pair Paternity.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Maternal Investment Is Positively Associated With the Presence of Extra-Pair Offspring in a Socially Monogamous Songbird.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Cooperative breeding and the selection for information sharing among groupmates.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2025Article
- Evolutionarily stable investments in recognition systems explain patterns of discrimination failure and success.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Theory predicts that individuals behave altruistically towards their relatives. Hence, some form of kin recognition is useful for individuals to optimize their behavior. In species that display bi-parental care and are subject to extra-pair matings, kin recognition theoretically can allow cuckolded fathers to reduce their parental investment, and thus optimize their fitness. Whether this is possible remains unclear in birds. This study investigates whether males provide differential parental care depending on relatedness, as a proxy to recognizing chicks in their nest as kin or not. We cross-fostered House sparrow (Passer domesticus) chicks after hatching, and then expected that fathers would show a decrease in their parental efforts when tending to a clutch of unrelated offspring. House sparrow males are able to adjust their parental care to the identity of their partner, making them an ideal study species. However, there was no significant effect of relatedness on provisioning rates. This suggests that sparrows may not be capable of kin recognition, or at least do not display kin discrimination despite its apparent evolutionary advantage.
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Registered trials
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