Dataset Information

Banded mongooses avoid inbreeding when mating with members of the same natal group.

ABSTRACT: Inbreeding and inbreeding avoidance are key factors in the evolution of animal societies, influencing dispersal and reproductive strategies which can affect relatedness structure and helping behaviours. In cooperative breeding systems, individuals typically avoid inbreeding through reproductive restraint and/or dispersing to breed outside their natal group. However, where groups contain multiple potential mates of varying relatedness, strategies of kin recognition and mate choice may be favoured. Here, we investigate male mate choice and female control of paternity in the banded mongoose (Mungos mungo), a cooperatively breeding mammal where both sexes are often philopatric and mating between relatives is known to occur. We find evidence suggestive of inbreeding depression in banded mongooses, indicating a benefit to avoiding breeding with relatives. Successfully breeding pairs were less related than expected under random mating, which appeared to be driven by both male choice and female control of paternity. Male banded mongooses actively guard females to gain access to mating opportunities, and this guarding behaviour is preferentially directed towards less closely related females. Guard-female relatedness did not affect the guard's probability of gaining reproductive success. However, where mate-guards are unsuccessful, they lose paternity to males that are less related to the females than themselves. Together, our results suggest that both sexes of banded mongoose use kin discrimination to avoid inbreeding. Although this strategy appears to be rare among cooperative breeders, it may be more prominent in species where relatedness to potential mates is variable, and/or where opportunities for dispersal and mating outside of the group are limited.

SUBMITTER: Sanderson JL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5008155 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Banded mongooses avoid inbreeding when mating with members of the same natal group.

Sanderson Jennifer L JL Wang Jinliang J Vitikainen Emma I K EI Cant Michael A MA Nichols Hazel J HJ

Molecular ecology 20150611 14

Inbreeding and inbreeding avoidance are key factors in the evolution of animal societies, influencing dispersal and reproductive strategies which can affect relatedness structure and helping behaviours. In cooperative breeding systems, individuals typically avoid inbreeding through reproductive restraint and/or dispersing to breed outside their natal group. However, where groups contain multiple potential mates of varying relatedness, strategies of kin recognition and mate choice may be favoured ...[more]

PMID: 26095171

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Project description:Intergroup conflict is widespread in nature and is proposed to have strong impacts on the evolution of social behavior. The conflict-cohesion hypothesis predicts that exposure to intergroup conflict should lead to increased social cohesion to improve group success or resilience in future conflicts. There is evidence to support this prediction from studies of affiliative responses to outgroup threats in some animal societies. However, most of these studies have focused on behavioral changes over short time periods (minutes and hours after exposure to an outgroup), and hence very little is known about the dynamics and durability of responses to intergroup conflict over the longer term. We investigated this question by simulating intergroup encounters in wild banded mongooses (Mungos mungo) and measuring social behavior before, during, and after these encounters over a 5-day period. We also ran control trials with non-threatening stimuli. Banded mongooses reacted immediately to intrusion stimuli by vocalizing, grouping together, and advancing on the stimulus. In the first 5 min after simulated intrusions, we saw an elevation in grooming levels, but in the hour after exposure grooming rates declined sharply, contrary to our expectation. In the two subsequent days, grooming rates remained at this depressed rate. In control trials, the initial increase in grooming was not seen, but grooming declined compared to the longer-term time periods. Grooming changed across time, but not in the same pattern as during intrusions, suggesting that intrusions had an impact above and beyond that of the experimental setup. The dynamics of grooming responses were short lived and more complex than we initially expected. We suggest this unexpected result may be linked to the frequency of aggressive intergroup encounters in this system. As control and experimental trials were run at different times of year, future work would be needed to confirm that these relative patterns are replicable. Our results indicate short-lived impacts of outgroup threat on measures of social cohesion in this species, but cannot confirm longer-term changes.

Project description:BACKGROUND:Glucocorticoids mediate responses to perceived stressors, thereby restoring homeostasis. However, prolonged glucocorticoid elevation may cause homeostatic overload. Using extensive field investigations of banded mongoose (Mungos mungo) groups in northern Botswana, we assessed the influence of reproduction, predation risk, and food limitation on apparent homeostatic overload (n=13 groups, 1542 samples from 268 animals). We experimentally manipulated reproduction and regulated food supply in captive mongooses, and compared their glucocorticoid responses to those obtained from free-living groups. RESULTS:At the population level, variation in glucocorticoid levels in free-living mongooses was explained by food limitation: fecal organic matter, recent rainfall, and access to concentrated anthropogenic food resources. Soil macrofauna density and reproductive events explained less and predation risk very little variation in glucocorticoid levels. Reproduction and its associated challenges alone (under regulated feeding conditions) increased glucocorticoid levels 19-fold in a captive group. Among free-living groups, glucocorticoid elevation was seasonal (occurring in late dry season or early wet season when natural food resources were less available), but the timing of peak glucocorticoid production was moderated by access to anthropogenic resources (groups with fewer anthropogenic food sources had peaks earlier in dry seasons). Peak months represented 12- and 16-fold increases in glucocorticoids relative to nadir months with some animals exhibiting 100-fold increases. Relative to the captive group nadir, some free-living groups exhibited 60-fold increases in peak glucocorticoid levels with some animals exhibiting up to 800-fold increases. Most of these animals exhibited 1- to 10-fold increases relative to the captive animal peak. CONCLUSIONS:Banded mongooses exhibit seasonal chronic glucocorticoid elevation, associated primarily with food limitation and secondarily with reproduction. Magnitude and duration of this elevation suggests that this may be maladaptive for some animals, with possible fitness consequences. In late dry season, this population may face a convergence of stressors (food limitation, agonistic encounters at concentrated food resources, evictions, estrus, mate competition, parturition, and predation pressure on pups), which may induce homeostatic overload.

Dataset Information

Banded mongooses avoid inbreeding when mating with members of the same natal group.

Publications

Banded mongooses avoid inbreeding when mating with members of the same natal group.

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