| coalitions of relatives and reproductive skew in cooperatively breeding white-winged choughs. | we used dna fingerprinting to examine reproductive skew in cooperatively breeding white-winged choughs, corcorax melanorhamphos, which live in groups of up to 20 individuals. before a severe drought, groups that had been stable for multiple years were characterized by long-term monogamy involving a single breeding pair (high skew). after the drought, new groups formed from the amalgamation of multiple individuals and coalitions of relatives. at most one member of each faction succeeded in breedi ... | 2000 | 10714878 |
| social constraint and an absence of sex-biased dispersal drive fine-scale genetic structure in white-winged choughs. | this study used eight polymorphic microsatellite loci to examine the relative effects of social organization and dispersal on fine-scale genetic structure in an obligately cooperative breeding bird, the white-winged chough (corcorax melanorhamphos). using both individual-level and population-level analyses, it was found that the majority of chough groups consisted of close relatives and there was significant differentiation among groups (f(st) = 0.124). however, spatial autocorrelation analysis ... | 2008 | 19378407 |