Department of Collective Behaviour, Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Universitätsstrasse 10, 78457 Konstanz, Germany.
Chair of Biodiversity and Collective Behaviour, Department of Biology, University of Konstanz, Universitätsstrasse 10, 78457 Konstanz, Germany.
Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 2018 Aug;93(3):1558-1577. doi: 10.1111/brv.12408. Epub 2018 Mar 13.
Variation in extra-pair paternity (EPP) among individuals of the same population could result from stochastic demography or from individual differences in mating strategies. Although the adaptive value of EPP has been widely studied, much less is known about the characteristics of the social environment that drive the observed patterns of EPP. Here, we demonstrate how concepts and well-developed tools for the study of social behaviour (such as social network analysis) can enhance the study of extra-pair mating decisions (focussing in particular on avian mating systems). We present several hypotheses that describe how characteristics of the social environment in which individuals are embedded might influence the levels of EPP in a socially monogamous population. We use a multi-level social approach (Hinde, 1976) to achieve a detailed description of the social structure and social dynamics of individuals in a group. We propose that the pair-bond, the direct (local) social environment and the indirect (extended) social environment, can contribute in different ways to the variation observed in the patterns of EPP, at both the individual and the population level. A strength of this approach is that it integrates into the analysis (indirect) interactions with all potential mates in a population, thus extending the current framework to study extra-pair mating behaviour. We also encourage the application of social network methods such as temporal dynamic analysis to depict temporal changes in the patterns of interactions among individuals in a group, and to study how this affects mating behaviour. We argue that this new framework will contribute to a better understanding of the proximate mechanisms that drive variation in EPP within populations in socially monogamous species, and might ultimately provide insights into the evolution and maintenance of mating systems.
同一物种个体之间的额外交配（EPP）的变异可能是由随机的种群动态或交配策略的个体差异引起的。虽然 EPP 的适应价值已经得到了广泛的研究，但对于驱动 EPP 观察模式的社会环境特征却知之甚少。在这里，我们展示了如何使用社会行为研究的概念和成熟工具（如社会网络分析）来增强对额外交配决策的研究（特别是关注鸟类交配系统）。我们提出了几个假设，描述了个体所处的社会环境特征如何影响社会一夫一妻制种群中的 EPP 水平。我们采用多层次的社会方法（Hinde，1976）来详细描述群体中个体的社会结构和社会动态。我们提出，配偶关系、直接（局部）社会环境和间接（扩展）社会环境可以以不同的方式对个体和种群水平上 EPP 模式的变异做出贡献。这种方法的一个优点是，它将（间接）与群体中所有潜在配偶的相互作用纳入分析中，从而将当前的框架扩展到研究额外的交配行为。我们还鼓励应用社会网络方法，如时间动态分析，来描述群体中个体之间相互作用模式的时间变化，并研究这种变化如何影响交配行为。我们认为，这个新框架将有助于更好地理解驱动社会一夫一妻制物种中 EPP 变异的近因机制，并最终为理解交配系统的进化和维持提供新的视角。
