Social and spatial effects on genetic variation between foraging flocks in a wild bird population

Social interactions are rarely random. In some instances animals exhibit homophily or heterophily, the tendency to interact with similar or dissimilar conspecifics respectively. Genetic homophily and heterophily influence the evolutionary dynamics of populations, because they potentially affect sexual and social selection. Here we investigate the link between social interactions and allele frequencies in foraging flocks of great tits (Parus major) over three consecutive years. We constructed co-occurrence networks which explicitly described the splitting and merging of 85,602 flocks through time (fission-fusion dynamics), at 60 feeding sites. Of the 1711 birds in those flocks we genotyped 962 individuals at 4701 autosomal single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). By combining genome-wide genotyping with repeated field observations of the same individuals we were able to investigate links between social structure and allele frequencies at a much finer scale than was previously possible. We...

社会互动极少是随机的。某些情况下，动物表现出同嗜性（homophily）或异嗜性（heterophily），即分别倾向于与相似或不同的同种个体互动。遗传同嗜性与异嗜性会影响种群的进化动态，因其可能作用于性选择与社会选择。本研究连续三年探究大山雀（Parus major）觅食群体中社会互动与等位基因频率之间的关联。我们构建了共现网络，明确描述了60个取食点处85,602个群体随时间的分裂与融合（裂变-融合动态）。在这些群体的1711只鸟中，我们对962只个体的4701个常染色体单核苷酸多态性（SNPs）进行了基因分型。通过将全基因组分型与对相同个体的重复野外观察相结合，我们得以在比以往更精细的尺度上探究社会结构与等位基因频率之间的关联。我们...