Promiscuity, inbreeding and dispersal propensity in great tits

Mating with relatives leads to inbred offspring, which are likely to experience reduced fitness owing to the expression of deleterious recessive alleles. Constraints in social mate choice do not always allow individuals to avoid pairing with kin. A possible means of inbreeding avoidance is to engage in extrapair copulations with unrelated extrapair individuals. In a […]