Abstract
Knowledge of kin relationships between members of wild animal populations has broad application in ecology and evolution research by allowing the investigation of dispersal dynamics, mating systems, inbreeding avoidance, kin recognition, and kin selection as well as aiding the management of endangered populations. However, the assessment of kinship among members of wild animal populations is difficult in the absence of detailed multigenerational pedigrees. Here, we first review the distinction between genetic relatedness and kinship derived from pedigrees and how this makes the identification of kin using genetic data inherently challenging. We then describe useful approaches to kinship classification, such as parentage analysis and sibship reconstruction, and explain how the combined use of marker systems with biparental and uniparental inheritance, demographic information, likelihood analyses, relatedness coefficients, and estimation of misclassification rates can yield reliable classifications of kinship in groups with complex kin structures. We outline alternative approaches for cases in which explicit knowledge of dyadic kinship is not necessary, but indirect inferences about kinship on a group‐ or population‐wide scale suffice, such as whether more highly related dyads are in closer spatial proximity. Although analysis of highly variable microsatellite loci is still the dominant approach for studies on wild populations, we describe how the long‐awaited use of large‐scale single‐nucleotide polymorphism and sequencing data derived from noninvasive low‐quality samples may eventually lead to highly accurate assessments of varying degrees of kinship in wild populations.
Highlights
Knowledge of kin relationships between members of wild animal populations has broad application in ecology and evolution research by allowing the investigation of dispersal dynamics, mating systems, inbreeding avoidance, kin recognition, and kin selection as well as aiding the management of endangered populations
A long-standing goal in kinship studies has been to assess kin relationships by the use of genetic analysis, which has typically employed microsatellite genotype analysis of DNA derived from noninvasive samples
Comparing genotypes of different individuals and classifying them into kinship categories such as “sister” or “cousin” are difficult. This is because genetic relatedness is a continuous parameter determined by the proportion of the genome shared between two individuals by descent from a common ancestor and, if inferred from a limited number of markers, does not necessarily correspond to theoretical expectations based on the categorical pedigree relationship for a given dyad (Blouin 2003)
Summary
Members of one sex disperse, while members of the philopatric sex live in close proximity to kin and nonkin. Distinguishing between close relatives and unrelated conspecifics allows individuals to obtain direct or inclusive fitness benefits by biasing affiliative or coalitionary behaviors toward relatives while avoiding inbreeding and competition with relatives (Hamilton 1964). Recent studies of wild populations have demonstrated an effect of kinship on allonursing in cooperative breeders (MacLeod et al 2013), identified kin biases in association (Bercovitch and Berry 2013) and affiliation (Widdig et al 2016), and shown parallel dispersal of kin (Wikberg et al 2014) and inbreeding avoidance (Sanderson et al 2015). Knowledge of the population-wide distribution of pairs of kin and nonkin can be used to identify dispersal patterns (Van Noordwijk et al 2012) or reproductive skew (Vigilant et al 2015).
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