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ToolsChesterton, Ellie, Sparks, Alexandra M., Burke, Terry, Komdeur, Jan, Richardson, David S. and Dugdale, Hannah L. (2024) The impact of helping experience on helper life-history and fitness in a cooperatively breeding bird. Evolution, 78 (4). pp. 690-700. ISSN 0014-3820
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Abstract
Cooperative breeding occurs when helpers provide alloparental care to the offspring of a breeding pair. One hypothesis of why helping occurs is that helpers gain valuable skills that may increase their own future reproductive success. However, research typically focuses on the effect of helping on short-term measures of reproductive success. Fewer studies have considered how helping affects long-term fitness measures. Here, we analyze how helping experience affects key breeding and fitness-related parameters in the Seychelles warbler (Acrocephalus sechellensis). Importantly, we control for females that have cobred (reproduced as a subordinate by laying an egg within a territory in which they are not a dominant breeder), as they already have experience with direct reproduction. Helping experience had no significant association with any of the metrics considered, except that helpers had an older age at first dominance. Accounting for helping experience, females that had cobred produced more adult offspring (≥1 year) after acquiring dominance and had a higher lifetime reproductive success (LRS) than females that had never cobred. Our results suggest that, in the Seychelles warbler, helping experience alone does not increase the fitness of helpers in any of the metrics considered, and highlights the importance of separating the effects of helping from cobreeding. Our findings also emphasize the importance of analyzing the effect of helping at various life-history stages, as higher short-term fitness may not translate to an overall increase in LRS.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Additional Information: | Data availability statement: DOI: 10.5061/dryad.ht76hdrnd. Funding information: E.C. was supported by a Leeds Doctoral Scholarship and a Climate Research Bursary Fund, University of Leeds, and A.M.S. was supported by a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grant (NE/P011284/1 to H.L.D. and D.S.R). The long term data gathering that enabled this study was supported by various NERC grants including NE/B504106/1 (T.A.B. and D.S.R.), NE/I021748/1 (H.L.D.), and NE/F02083X/1 and NE/K005502/1 (D.S.R.); as well as a Dutch Research Council (NWO) Rubicon (825.09.013), Lucie Burgers Foundation, and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Schure Beijerinck Popping grant (SBP2013/04) to H.L.D., NWO visitors grant (040.11.232 to J.K. and H.L.D.) and NWO grants (854.11.003 and 823.01.014 to J.K.). |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | cobreeding,cooperative breeding,helper fitness benefits,lifetime reproductive success,seychelles warbler,skills hypothesis,ecology, evolution, behavior and systematics,genetics,agricultural and biological sciences(all) ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1100/1105 |
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| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 11 Feb 2025 10:30 |
| Last Modified: | 28 Mar 2025 13:12 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/98447 |
| DOI: | 10.1093/evolut/qpad199 |
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