Alpha male chacma baboons experience uncontested access to individual estrus females. Consequently, alpha male paternity certainty is high and underpins significant levels of infanticide by immigrant males that, in turn, has selected for male defense of infants. There is also, however, a high probability that alpha males will be absent during the period when their own offspring are vulnerable, ...

As evidenced by the articles in this volume, a recent increase in interest in the mating systems of poikilothermic vertebrates has focused primarily on fishes, a few amphibians, and squamate reptiles. Turtles by contrast have received relatively little attention, yet they display a wide variety of mating behaviors and life-history characteristics that make them excellent candidates for addressi...

The objective of the present study was to estimate (co)variance components for length of productive life (LPL) and some alternative reproductive traits of 6-year-old Nellore cattle. The data set contained 57,410 records for age at first calving from Nellore females and was edited to remove animal records with uncertain paternity and cows with just one piece of calving information. Only animals ...

Little is known about the reproductive behaviors and the actual outcomes of mating attempts in the gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus). We examined the mating system and reproductive behaviors of a population of gopher tortoises in central Florida. Using microsatellite markers, we assigned fathers to the offspring of seven clutches and determined that multiple fathers were present in two of t...

We studied the frequency of multiple paternity for American lobster (Homarus americanus) at three Canadian sites differing in exploitation rate and mean adult size. The probability of detecting multiple paternity using four microsatellite loci and 100 eggs per female was in excess of 99% under various scenarios of paternal contribution. Overall, 13% of the 108 examined females carried a clutch ...

Hedging their bets? Male and female chacma baboons form friendships based on likelihood of paternity Liza R. Moscovice *, Anthony Di Fiore , Catherine Crockford , Dawn M. Kitchen , Roman Wittig , Robert M. Seyfarth , Dorothy L. Cheney f Department of Biological Sciences, Binghamton University, NY, U.S.A. Department of Anthropology, New York University, New York, NY, U.S.A. c School of Psycholog...

Theories suggest that, in cooperatively breeding species, female control over paternity and reproductive output may affect male reproductive skew and group stability. Female paternity control may come about through cryptic female choice or female reproductive behaviour, but experimental studies are scarce. Here, we show a new form of female paternity control in a cooperatively polyandrous cichl...

In polygamous systems, male fitness is determined not only by mating success but also by fertilization success. Despite the growing interest over the past several decades in postcopulatory sexual selection, its relative importance compared to precopulatory sexual selection remains a subject of debate. Here, we use extensive behavioral observations of a seminatural population of Hawaiian swordta...

The evolutionary trajectories of reproductive systems, including both male and female multiple mating and hence polygyny and polyandry, are expected to depend on the additive genetic variances and covariances in and among components of male reproductive success achieved through different reproductive tactics. However, genetic covariances among key components of male reproductive success have no...

BACKGROUND Long time interval between pregnancies has been found to increase the risk of pre-eclampsia in second pregnancy. Our aim was to investigate whether this effect is influenced by a history of pre-eclampsia or a change in paternity. METHODS We studied 547 238 women with a first and second pregnancy registered in the Medical Birth Registry of Norway, 1967-1998. The relative risk of pre...