ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Familiarity breeds success: pairs that meet earlier experience increased breeding performance in a wild bird population.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
- Flexible Responses to Wildfires by Great Tits (Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Non-breeding social behaviour as an investment in reducing future territoriality costs.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Timing and social dynamics of divorce in wild great tits: a phenomenological approach.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Demonstrating the reproductive consequences of cognition: learning from experience.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Mate-switching is not associated with offspring fitness in a socially monogamous bird.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Pair-bond strength is consistent and related to partner responsiveness in a wild corvid.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Animal social networks are robust to changing association definitions.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2025Article
- Rainfall is associated with divorce in the socially monogamous Seychelles warbler.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Human-Caused High Direct Mortality in Birds: Unsustainable Trends and Ameliorative Actions.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Causes and consequences of divorce in a long-lived socially monogamous bird.Ecology letters · 2024Article
- Societies with fission-fusion dynamics as complex adaptive systems: the importance of scale.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Coordination of parental performance is breeding phase-dependent in the Dovekie (Alle alle), a pelagic Arctic seabird.PloS one · 2024Article
- Characteristics of the Mating Behavior of Domesticated Geese fromAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Causes and consequences of pair-bond disruption in a sex-skewed population of a long-lived monogamous seabird.Ecological monographs · 2022Article
- Songbird parents coordinate offspring provisioning at fine spatio-temporal scales.The Journal of animal ecology · 2022Article
- Familiarity breeds success: pairs that meet earlier experience increased breeding performance in a wild bird population.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- High spatial pair cohesion during and after breeding in a socially monogamous territorial passerine.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
- 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
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
In socially monogamous animals, including humans, pairs can meet and spend time together before they begin reproduction. However, the pre-breeding period has been challenging to study in natural populations, and thus remains largely unexplored. As such, our understanding of the benefits of mate familiarity is almost entirely limited to assessments of repeated breeding with a particular partner. Here, we used fine-scale tracking technology to gather 6 years of data on pre-breeding social associations of individually marked great tits in a wild population. We show that pairs which met earlier in the winter laid their eggs earlier in all years. Clutch size, number of hatched and fledged young, and hatching and fledging success were not influenced by parents' meeting time directly, but indirectly: earlier laying pairs had larger clutches (that also produce higher number of young), and higher hatching and fledging success. We did not detect a direct influence of the length of the initial pairing period on future mating decisions (stay with a partner or divorce). These findings suggest a selective advantage for a new pair to start associating earlier (or for individuals to mate with those they have known for longer). We call for more studies to explore the generality of fitness effects of pair familiarity prior to first breeding, and to elucidate the mechanisms underlying these effects.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.