Paternal kinship: patterns, mechanisms and cues

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Anja Widdig
• Subject Area: Sensory and Behavioural Biology
• Term: from 2007 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 46793414

Previous studies have shown that mammals, including primates, can recognize their paternal kin as individuals bias their social behavior to their paternal kin in comparison to unrelated individuals. In order to have the opportunity to interact not only with unrelated individuals, but also with paternal kin, an animal society would have to live, even if only temporarily, in stable multi-male multi-female groups where females mate with multiple males and male reproduction is highly skewed towards a few sires. The first aim of the present project is to investigate patterns of paternal kinship within and across groups in different species in order to predict the potential for selection for paternal kin bias. The second aim is to complete our knowledge of the mechanisms underlying paternal kin discrimination as the most likely mechanisms (familiarity and phenotype matching) are difficult to disentangle. The final aim of this project is to study potential cues such as similarity in odor, MHC, appearance, acoustics and/or personality which might be used by animals to identify paternal kin. The results of this study would provide an important contribution to our understanding of the impact of kinship on the evolution of social behavior in humans and other primates.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups