'O father: where art thou?'- Paternity assessment in an open fission-fusion society of wild bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.) in Shark Bay, Western Australia

Sexually mature male bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay cooperate by pursuing distinct alliance strategies to monopolize females in reproductive condition. We present the results of a comprehensive study in a wild cetacean population to test whether male alliance membership is a prerequisite for repro...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Molecular ecology 2004-07, Vol.13 (7), p.1975-1990
Main Authors: Krützen, Michael, Barré, Lynne M., Connor, Richard C., Mann, Janet, Sherwin, William B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
alliance formation
Animals
Bayes Theorem
Bayesian inference of paternity
bottlenose dolphin
Cetacea
Cooperative Behavior
Dolphins - genetics
Dolphins - physiology
Female
Likelihood Functions
Male
Marine
Microsatellite Repeats - genetics
paternity index
Reproduction - physiology
Sexual Behavior, Animal - physiology
Tursiops
Tursiops sp
Western Australia
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Summary:Sexually mature male bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay cooperate by pursuing distinct alliance strategies to monopolize females in reproductive condition. We present the results of a comprehensive study in a wild cetacean population to test whether male alliance membership is a prerequisite for reproductive success. We compared two methods for inferring paternity: both calculate a likelihood ratio, called the paternity index, between two opposing hypotheses, but they differ in the way that significance is applied to the data. The first method, a Bayesian approach commonly used in human paternity testing, appeared to be overly conservative for our data set, but would be less susceptible to assumptions if a larger number of microsatellite loci had been used. Using the second approach, the computer program cervus 2.0, we successfully assigned 11 paternities to nine males, and 17 paternities to 14 out of 139 sexually mature males at 95% and 80% confidence levels, respectively. It appears that being a member of a bottlenose dolphin alliance is not a prerequisite for paternity: two paternities were obtained by juvenile males (one at the 95%, the other at the 80% confidence level), suggesting that young males without alliance partners pursue different mating tactics to adults. Likelihood analyses showed that these two juvenile males were significantly more likely to be the true father of the offspring than to be their half‐sibling (P 
ISSN:0962-1083
1365-294X
DOI:10.1111/j.1365-294X.2004.02192.x