Philopatry yields higher fitness than dispersal in a cooperative breeder with sex-specific life history trajectories

Social evolution is tightly linked to dispersal decisions, but the ecological and social factors selecting for philopatry or dispersal often remain obscure. Elucidating selection mechanisms underlying alternative life histories requires measurement of fitness effects in the wild. We report on a long-term field study of 496 individually marked cooperatively breeding fish, showing that philopatry is beneficial as it increases breeding tenure and lifetime reproductive success in both sexes. Dispersers predominantly join established groups and end up in smaller groups when they ascend to dominance. Life history trajectories are sex specific, with males growing faster, dying earlier, and dispersing more, whereas females more likely inherit a breeding position. Increased male dispersal does not seem to reflect an adaptive preference but rather sex-specific differences in intrasexual competition. Cooperative groups may thus be maintained because of inherent benefits of philopatry, of which females seem to get the greater share in social cichlids.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Science Advances

• Publication date

  2023-03-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1126/sciadv.add2146PMID 36867697PMCID 9984175
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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