Social environment and the evolution of delayed reproduction in birds

One puzzling feature of avian life histories is that individuals in many different lineages delay reproduction for several years after they finish growing. Intraspecific field studies suggest that various complex social environments—such as cooperative breeding groups, nesting colonies, and display leks—result in delayed reproduction because they require forms of sociosexual development that extend beyond physical maturation. Here, we formally propose this hypothesis and use a full suite of phylogenetic comparative methods to test it, analyzing the evolution of age at first reproduction (AFR) in females and males across 963 species of birds. Phylogenetic regressions support increased AFR in colonial females and males, cooperatively breeding males, and lekking males. Continuous Ornstein-Uhlenbeck models support distinct evolutionary regimes with increased AFR for all of the cooperative, colonial, and lekking lineages. Discrete hidden state Markov models suggest a net increase in delayed ..., Secondary data collection from encyclopedia references, supplemented by additional published reports on target families or species. See the main data file for individual species references and source text quotations., , # Social environment and the evolution of delayed reproduction in birds

https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ttdz08m80

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This repository contains the data (**data_clean.tsv**) and analysis files needed to replicate the analyses in our manuscript. 

NOTE - The original version of the dataset includes full source quotation information and explanations of how every AFR value is derived from available information. These raw quotations cannot be provided in this repository due to copyright restrictions. Contact L. U. Taylor for a version of the dataset with all quotations.

## Data file descriptions

### data_clean.tsv

* *Index_Clements*: (int) Taxonomic index from the Clements v2023b Taxonomy
* *Avibase_ID*: (chr) AviBase ID associated with this taxon in the Clements v2023b Taxonomy
* *Order_Clements*: (chr) Taxonomic Order from the Clements v2023b Taxonomy
* *Family_Clements*: (chr) Taxonomic Family from the Clements v2023b Taxonomy
* *Taxon_Clements*: (chr) Genus and species binomial from ...,