Abstract
Individuals of many species form bonds with their breeding partners, yet the mechanisms maintaining these bonds are poorly understood. In birds, allopreening is a conspicuous feature of interactions between breeding partners and has been hypothesized to play a role in strengthening and maintaining pair bonds within and across breeding attempts. Many avian species, however, do not allopreen and the relationship between allopreening and pair bonding across species remains unexplored. In a comparative analysis of allopreening and pair bond behavior, we found that allopreening between breeding partners was more common among species where parents cooperate to rear offspring. The occurrence of allopreening was also associated with an increased likelihood that partners would remain together over successive breeding seasons. However, there was no strong evidence for an association between allopreening and sexual fidelity within seasons or time spent together outside the breeding season. Allopreening between partners was also no more common in colonial or cooperatively breeding species than in solitary species. Analyses of evolutionary transitions indicated that allopreening evolved from an ancestral state of either high parental cooperation or high partner retention, and we discuss possible explanations for this. Overall, our results are consistent with an important role for allopreening in the maintenance of avian pair bonds.
Highlights
Types of social relationship between males and females vary from promiscuous species with no bond to long-term social monogamy, yet behaviors associated with these different types of relationship remain poorly understood
We searched published sources for information on the following aspects of avian pair bonds: parental cooperation over offspring care, duration of offspring care, annual divorce rate, extra-pair paternity (EPP; percentage of broods containing extra-pair offspring) and duration of the pair bond throughout the year
Controlling for phylogeny, we found that allopreening was associated with greater cooperation between parents over offspring care (n = 418 species, Table 1, Figure 2a)
Summary
Types of social relationship between males and females vary from promiscuous species with no bond to long-term social monogamy, yet behaviors associated with these different types of relationship remain poorly understood. One behavior that may play an important role in maintaining a social relationship between partners is allopreening (mutual preening), whereby the bill is used to preen the partner’s feathers. The social function of allopreening in birds is considerably less well understood. This is surprising given the striking variation across bird species in the occurrence of allopreening: in some species, allopreening is a highly conspicuous feature of breeding partner interactions; in others this behavior is entirely absent. The removal of ectoparasites by allopreening may provide long-term fitness benefits by maintaining the health of both breeding partners in species with long-term pair bonds (Black 1996)
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