No evidence for male retaliation in a population with high level of extra-pair paternity

Gyarmathy, Helga and Kopena, Renata and Kneifel, Tünde and Sarkadi, Fanni and Szöllősi, Eszter and Szász, Eszter and Török, János and Rosivall, Balázs (2025) No evidence for male retaliation in a population with high level of extra-pair paternity. ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION, 15 (5). No. e71423. ISSN 2045-7758

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Abstract

Extra-pair paternity (EPP) is a widespread phenomenon, as EPP has been observed in 76% of the socially monogamous bird species. Many hypotheses try to explain the evolution of infidelity. While females may participate in extra-pair copulations, for instance, to ensure the fertilisation of their eggs or to obtain potential genetic benefits for their offspring, unfaithful females face many potential costs too. As nestling provisioning is one of, if not the most energetically costly forms of parental care, the certainty of paternity hypothesis predicts that males with an unfaithful partner reduce their parental investment to avoid the fitness loss arising from rearing unrelated nestlings. We investigated the relationship between the presence and proportion of extra-pair young (EPY) and the feeding rate of the social male to reveal whether males recognise and penalise unfaithfulness. We conducted the study in a Hungarian population of collared flycatchers (Ficedula albicollis) where the EPP rate had been reported to be high. We crossfostered nestlings so that each parent reared offspring from two foreign broods and none from their own. Thus, any relationship between paternal investment and paternity in the original brood of the male should be the direct consequence of the female's mating behaviour (as perceived by the male) and not the result of early maternal effects or different behaviour of extra- and within-pair offspring. We found that 63.6% of the broods contained EPY, and 23% of the nestlings were sired by extra-pair fathers. The only relationship we found was that males with larger broods fed their offspring more frequently. Neither the prevalence nor the proportion of EPY was related to the male feeding rate; thus, our results do not support the certainty of paternity hypothesis. This might be explained by the inability of the males to track their females' behaviour in a population with a high EPP rate.

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