Animal ecologists commonly assume that the reduced fitness that often afflicts inbred
offspring will inevitably cause selection for inbreeding avoidance. Although early empirical …

Social systems are the outcomes of natural and sexual selection on individuals' efforts to
maximize reproductive success. Ecological conditions, life history, demography traits and …

Inbreeding depression is of major concern for the conservation of threatened species, and
inbreeding avoidance is thought to be a key driver in the evolution of mating systems …

Bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops cf. aduncus, in Shark Bay, Western Australia exhibit the most
complex alliances known outside of humans. Advances in our understanding of these …

It has been proposed that in slow‐growing vertebrate populations survival generally has a
greater influence on population growth than reproduction. Despite many studies cautioning …

Conservation of top predators has been emphasized as essential in an ecosystem due to
their role in trophic chain regulation. Optimizing conservation strategies for these …

In this quantitative study of locational and social dispersal at the individual level, we show
that bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.) continued to use their natal home ranges well into …

Reproductive senescence is evident across many mammalian species. An emerging
perspective considers components of reproductive senescence as evolutionarily distinct …

Socially learned behaviours leading to genetic population structure have rarely been
described outside humans. Here, we provide evidence of fine-scale genetic structure that …

We used data from 78 individuals at 26 microsatellite loci to infer parental and sibling
relationships within a community of fish-eating (“resident”) eastern North Pacific killer whales …