Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 60, Issue 6, December 2000, Pages 867-877
Animal Behaviour

Regular Article
High frequency of extrapair fertilization in a plural breeding bird, the Mexican jay, revealed by DNA microsatellites

https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.2000.1554Get rights and content

Abstract

We used tetra-nucleotide microsatellite DNA typing to estimate the frequency of extrapair fertilization (EPF) in a plural breeding species, the Mexican jay, Aphelocoma ultramarina, in Arizona. We found EPF in 32 of 51 complete broods (63%) and 55 of 139 nestlings (40%) for which the putative father had been identified (one of the highest rates of EPF known for birds). At least 96.1% of EPF fathers came from within the group. This is by far the highest known within-group EPF rate among socially monogamous, communally rearing species. Most (70%) males of breeding age (3+ years) had no genetic paternity in a given year. Social fathers (i.e. those with nests and mated females) rarely obtained EPFs; of 25 social fathers, 23 had young in only one nest and only two had young in two nests by virtue of EPF. Of the 27 males known to be EPF fathers without a nest of their own, none had young in more than one nest. Only 7% of EPF fathers had their own broods reaching banding age (day 14), compared with 29.7% of social fathers. The proportion of EPF young was significantly larger in smaller broods. Breeding females in all age classes were equally likely to have EPF young.

References (79)

  • J.V. Briskie et al.

    Paternity and paternal care in the polygynandrous Smith's longspur

    Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology

    (1998)
  • M.C. Brooker et al.

    Promiscuity: an inbreeding avoidance mechanism in a socially monogamous species

    Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology

    (1990)
  • J.L. Brown

    Social organization and behavior of the Mexican jay

    Condor

    (1963)
  • J.L. Brown

    Communal feeding of nestlings in the Mexican jay (Aphelocoma ultramarina): interflock comparisons

    Animal Behaviour

    (1972)
  • J.L. Brown

    The Evolution of Behavior

    (1975)
  • J.L. Brown

    Avian communal breeding systems

    Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics

    (1978)
  • J.L. Brown

    Helping and Communal Breeding in Birds: Ecology and Evolution

    (1987)
  • J.L. Brown

    Mexican jay

  • J.L. Brown et al.

    Extended family system in a communal bird

    Science

    (1981)
  • J.L. Brown et al.

    Parental facilitation: parent–offspring relations in communally breeding birds

    Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology

    (1984)
  • J.L. Brown et al.

    Mexican Jays: uncooperative breeding

  • J.L. Brown et al.

    Delayed effect of monsoon rains influences laying date of a passerine bird living in an arid environment

    Condor

    (1996)
  • J.L. Brown et al.

    Dominance, age and reproductive success in a complex society: a long-term study of the Mexican jay

    Auk

    (1997)
  • J.P. Bruce et al.

    DNA fingerprinting reveals monogamy in the bushtit, a cooperatively breeding species

    Auk

    (1996)
  • T. Burke et al.

    Parental care and mating behaviour of polyandrous dunnocks ‘Prunella modularis’ related to paternity by DNA fingerprinting

    Nature

    (1989)
  • R. Chakraborty et al.

    Parentage analysis with genetic markers in natural populations. I. The expected proportion of offspring with unambiguous paternity

    Genetics

    (1988)
  • R. Chakraborty et al.

    Relative mutation rates at di-, tri- and tetranucleotide microsatellite loci

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A.

    (1997)
  • A. Chakravarti et al.

    The effect of linkage on paternity calculations

  • A. Cockburn

    Evolution of helping behavior in cooperatively breeding birds

    Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics

    (1998)
  • J.L. Craig et al.

    Subordinates must wait

    Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie

    (1982)
  • N.B. Davies

    Dunnock Behaviour and Social Evolution

    (1992)
  • N.B. Davies et al.

    Paternity and parental effort in dunnocks Prunella modularis: how good are male chick-feeding rules?

    Animal Behaviour

    (1992)
  • A. Dixon et al.

    Paternal investment inversely related to degree of extra-pair paternity in the reed bunting

    Nature

    (1994)
  • M.C. Double et al.

    Exclusion probabilities for single-locus paternity analysis when related males compete for matings

    Molecular Ecology

    (1997)
  • T.E. Dowling et al.

    Nucleic acids III: analysis of fragments and restriction sites

  • P.O. Dunn et al.

    Evolution of male parental care in a bird with almost complete cuckoldry

    Evolution

    (1996)
  • P.O. Dunn et al.

    Extrapair mate choice and honest signaling in cooperatively breeding superb fairy wrens

    Evolution

    (1999)
  • S.T. Emlen

    Predicting family dynamics in social vertebrates

  • S.T. Emlen et al.

    The role of kinship in helping decisions among white-fronted bee-eaters

    Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology

    (1988)
  • Cited by (30)

    • Reproductive partitioning and the assumptions of reproductive skew models in the cooperatively breeding American crow

      2009, Animal Behaviour
      Citation Excerpt :

      Of the 26 known cooperative jays and crows (Ligon & Burt 2004), the six species with described genetic mating systems show wide variation in both social mating systems and patterns of reproductive partitioning (Table 3). For example, the proportion of mixed-paternity broods in two cooperative Aphelocoma jays ranges from among the highest reported in birds (63% of broods in the plural breeding Mexican jay, Aphelocoma ultramarina; Li & Brown 2000) to the lowest (0% of broods in the monogamous Florida scrub-jay; Quinn et al. 1999). Likewise, mixed maternity within single broods occurs with apparent regularity in the white-throated magpie-jay, Calocitta formosa (Berg 2005), but rarely (Quinn et al. 1999; Baglione et al. 2002) or inconsistently (Lawton & Lawton 1985; Williams 2004) in the other corvids.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    f2

    S.-H. Li is now at the Department of Biology, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan.

    f1

    Correspondence and present address: J. L. Brown, Department of Biological Sciences, State University of New York, Albany, NY 12222, U.S.A. (email:[email protected]).

    View full text