ArticleScience advances2023
Philopatry yields higher fitness than dispersal in a cooperative breeder with sex-specific life history trajectories.
Article in Science advances, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Repeated evolution of cooperative breeding and life history traits in Lake Tanganyika cichlids.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Task allocation in a cooperative breeder reflects current needs, not early-life experience.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Multi-level societies: different tasks at different social levels.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- Submissive behavior is affected by territory structure in a social fish.Current zoology · 2024Article
- Article
- Executive functions and brain morphology of male and female dominant and subordinate cichlid fish.Brain and behavior · 2024Article
- Submissive behaviour is affected by group size in a social fish.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Early social complexity influences social behaviour but not social trajectories in a cooperatively breeding cichlid fish.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Stress axis programming generates long-term effects on cognitive abilities in a cooperative breeder.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Age- and sex-dependent variation in relatedness corresponds to reproductive skew, territory inheritance, and workload in cooperatively breeding cichlids.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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Abstract
Social evolution is tightly linked to dispersal decisions, but the ecological and social factors selecting for philopatry or dispersal often remain obscure. Elucidating selection mechanisms underlying alternative life histories requires measurement of fitness effects in the wild. We report on a long-term field study of 496 individually marked cooperatively breeding fish, showing that philopatry is beneficial as it increases breeding tenure and lifetime reproductive success in both sexes. Dispersers predominantly join established groups and end up in smaller groups when they ascend to dominance. Life history trajectories are sex specific, with males growing faster, dying earlier, and dispersing more, whereas females more likely inherit a breeding position. Increased male dispersal does not seem to reflect an adaptive preference but rather sex-specific differences in intrasexual competition. Cooperative groups may thus be maintained because of inherent benefits of philopatry, of which females seem to get the greater share in social cichlids.
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