Testing predictions of inclusive fitness theory in inbreeding relatives with biparental care.

ABSTRACT: Inclusive fitness theory predicts that parental care will vary with relatedness between potentially caring parents and offspring, potentially shaping mating system evolution. Systems with extra-pair paternity (EPP), and hence variable parent-brood relatedness, provide valuable opportunities to test this prediction. However, existing theoretical and empirical studies assume that a focal male is either an offspring's father with no inbreeding, or is completely unrelated. We highlight that this simple dichotomy does not hold given reproductive interactions among relatives, complicating the effect of EPP on parent-brood relatedness yet providing new opportunities to test inclusive fitness theory. Accordingly, we tested hierarchical hypotheses relating parental feeding rate to parent-brood rela

SUBMITTER: Gow EA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6939262 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature