BEHAVIORAL-CORRELATES OF MONOGAMY IN THE NOISY MINER, MANORINA-MELANOCEPHALA

Mating behaviour of female cooperatively breeding noisy miners was exa mined. Dow & Whitmore (1990, Cooperative Breeding in Birds (Ed. by P. B. Stacey & W. D. Koenig), pp. 559-592, Cambridge: Cambridge Universit y Press) suggested that female noisy miners mate promiscuously to recr uit males as helpers to their nests, and that the benefit of doing so might be (1) increased genetic variability of their broods or (2) incr eased survival of their offspring as a direct result of multi-male car e. Multilocus DNA profiling has since shown that 96.5% of nestlings re sulted from monogamous matings and that extra-group and multiple pater nity within broods were rare (Poldmaa et al. 1995, Behav. Ecol. Sociob iol., 37, 137-143). In this study, strong behavioural correlates of mo nogamy were found. A breeding female associated more often with only o ne male in her social group, and most of the female's sexual behaviour s were directed towards this male. Females were observed copulating re peatedly with the same male, but never with more than one male. Home r anges of breeding females rarely overlapped with each other, but home ranges of breeding males overlapped greatly. Furthermore, a greater pe rcentage of a female's home range was shared with that of her genetic mate than with those of other males. Thus, behavioural evidence is con sistent with the genetic evidence that noisy miners mate monogamously in some populations. (C) 1997 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.