Data from: A likelihood-based approach for assessment of extra-pair paternity and conspecific brood parasitism in natural populations

Genotypes are frequently used to assess alternative reproductive
strategies such as extra-pair paternity and conspecific brood parasitism
in wild populations. However, such analyses are vulnerable to genotyping
error or molecular artefacts that can bias results. For example, when
using multilocus microsatellite data, a mismatch at a single locus,
suggesting the offspring was not directly related to its putative parents,
can occur quite commonly even when the offspring is truly related. Some
recent studies have advocated an ad-hoc rule that offspring must differ at
more than one locus in order to conclude that they are not directly
related. While this reduces the frequency with which true offspring are
identified as not directly related young, it also introduces bias in the
opposite direction, wherein not directly related young are categorized as
true offspring. More importantly, it ignores the additional information on
allele frequencies which would reduce overall bias. In this study, we
present a novel technique for assessing extra-pair paternity and
conspecific brood parasitism using a likelihood-based approach in a new
version of program cervus. We test the suitability of the technique by
applying it to a simulated data set and then present an example to
demonstrate its influence on the estimation of alternative reproductive
strategies.