Quantitative genetics of the use of conspecific and heterospecific social cues for breeding site choice.

Jere Tolvanen,Jukka T Forsman,Piter Bijma,Veli‐Matti Pakanen,Blandine Doligez,Sami M Kivelä,Jennifer Morinay,Lars Gustafsson

doi:10.1111/evo.14071

Abstract

Social information use for decision‐making is common and affects ecological and evolutionary processes, including social aggregation, species coexistence, and cultural evolution. Despite increasing ecological knowledge on social information use, very little is known about its genetic basis and therefore its evolutionary potential. Genetic variation in a trait affecting an individual's social and nonsocial environment may have important implications for population dynamics, interspecific interactions, and, for expression of other, environmentally plastic traits. We estimated repeatability, additive genetic variance, and heritability of the use of conspecific and heterospecific social cues (abundance and breeding success) for breeding site choice in a population of wild collared flycatchers Ficedula albicollis. Repeatability was found for two social cues: previous year conspecific breeding success and previous year heterospecific abundance. Yet, additive genetic variances for these two social cues, and thus heritabilities, were low. This suggests that most of the phenotypic variation in the use of social cues and resulting conspecific and heterospecific social environment experienced by individuals in this population stems from phenotypic plasticity. Given the important role of social information use on ecological and evolutionary processes, more studies on genetic versus environmental determinism of social information use are needed.

Highlights

The use of social information may result in cultural evolution that may in turn affect genetic evolution and even speciation (Danchin et al 2004; Heyer et al 2005; Laland et al 2010; Verzijden et al 2012; Aplin et al 2015)
Genetic variation in a niche-constructive trait may result in spatially variable selection regimes within a population that may contribute to the maintenance of genetic variation both in the niche-constructive and other traits (Saltz and Nuzhdin 2014)
The overall result regarding the population level additive genetic variance and heritability was qualitatively identical to the more detailed sex-specific models, and we report the results based on the sex-specific models

Summary

Introduction

To reduce uncertainty in decision-making, animals need information about environmental quality (Dall et al 2005; Schmidt et al 2010) Such information can be obtained by observing the location, behavior, and success of other individuals, including heterospecifics (social information; Danchin et al 2004; Seppänen et al 2007; Schmidt et al 2010). The choice of conspecific social environment (colony size) was found to be heritable in the colonial cliff swallow (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) (Brown and Brown 2000) Whether these results can be generalized to other social cues and/or organisms in the wild, remains uncertain. For a given social behavior, genetic variation may vary considerably across species (e.g., aggressiveness: Lea et al 2010; Brent et al 2013; Weiss and Foerster 2013)

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