Mixed Parentage Broods Indicate Group Spawning in the Brood Parasitic Cuckoo Catfish.

ABSTRACT: Obligate brood parasites delegate the workload of costly parental care to their hosts. Theory predicts that release from demanding parental care increases the importance of other factors to shape mating patterns. However, behavioural observations and parentage estimates are notoriously difficult to obtain in species with covert reproductive strategies, such as brood parasites, and evidence for their mating strategies are scarce. Molecular genetic methods provide a powerful tool to identify concealed mating patterns. Here, we reconstruct the parentage of cuckoo catfish (Synodontis multipunctatus) clutches collected in the wild using a combination of newly developed microsatellite markers, mitochondrial markers, and maximum likelihood estimates of pairwise relatedness. Cuckoo catfish parasit

SUBMITTER: Zimmermann H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11874674 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature