Social pairing in the absence of reproductive senescence in a socially monogamous songbird

Reproductive senescence may affect mating decisions if older individuals produce fewer and lower-quality offspring, but the effect of reproductive senescence on mate choice decisions remains poorly understood. Mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli) do not exhibit clear reproductive senescence within their natural lifespans and therefore offer a unique opportunity to test whether the absence or delay of reproductive senescence affects social mate choice for mates of certain ages. Given the lack of obvious reproductive senescence in this species, we predicted that older individuals would be preferred as social mates because pairing with an experienced mate is often associated with direct and indirect benefits. In apparent support of our predictions, we observed positive assortment for age within breeding pairs and older individuals were more likely to be paired with one another than expected by chance. However, assortative pairing also occurred within most younger age classes, and when we ..., , # Data from: Social pairing in the absence of reproductive senescence in a socially monogamous songbird

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.9s4mw6mvf](10.5061/dryad.9s4mw6mvf)

## Description of the data and file structure

R scripts and data files to run analyses for \"Social pairing in the absence of reproductive senescence in a socially monogamous songbird\".

### Files and variables

#### File: MOCH_age_assortative_mating_pub.R

**Description:** R script to run correlation and permutation analyses to test for age assortative mating in Mountain Chickadees.

#### File: MOCH_divorce_rates_pub.R

**Description:** R script to calculate summary results of pairing across years and run divorce analyses.

#### File: MOCH_breeding_ages_pairing_analysis_pub.csv

**Description:** All breeding pairs and their ages by year for years 2017-2022.

##### Variables

* YEAR: year the pair bred together
* SEASON: season the pair bred together (seasons begin in September)
* ELEVATION: elevation (low or high), the...,