ArticleBehavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology
Opposite-sex associations are linked with annual fitness, but sociality is stable over lifetime.
Article in Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 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.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lifetime fitness and annual survival are heritable and highly genetically correlated in a wild primate population.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2026Article
- Lifetime fitness and annual survival are heritable and highly genetically correlated in a wild primate population.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Animal social networks are robust to changing association definitions.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2025Article
- Not so social in old age: demography as one driver of decreasing sociality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Variation in local population size predicts social network structure in wild songbirds.The Journal of animal ecology · 2023Article
- 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
- Sexual conflict and social networks in bed bugs: effects of social experience.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
- The ontogeny of social networks in wild great tits (Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Animal sociality, an individual's propensity to associate with others, has fitness consequences through mate choice, for example, directly, by increasing the pool of prospective partners, and indirectly through increased survival, and individuals benefit from both. Annually, fitness consequences are realized through increased mating success and subsequent fecundity. However, it remains unknown whether these consequences translate to lifetime fitness. Here, we quantified social associations and their link to fitness annually and over lifetime, using a multi-generational, genetic pedigree. We used social network analysis to calculate variables representing different aspects of an individual's sociality. Sociality showed high within-individual repeatability. We found that birds with more opposite-sex associates had higher annual fitness than those with fewer, but this did not translate to lifetime fitness. Instead, for lifetime fitness, we found evidence for stabilizing selection on opposite-sex sociality, and sociality in general, suggesting that reported benefits are only short-lived in a wild population, and that selection favors an average sociality.
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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.