Who's your daddy? Infidelity and paternity in reed warblers
Many species pair for life, or so the story goes. In reality, there is quite a bit of cheating going on. Both male and female partners may have "affairs" outside the pair bond. In such cases, how is a male to know if the chicks he´s feeding are really his? Depending on the species, males have different strategies. They may try to ensure paternity by increased surveillance and fighting off the competition, or by having more frequent sex with their long-term partners. Others react by physically punishing unfaithful females or by reducing parental care once the – potentially unrelated – offspring has arrived. Herbert Hoi and colleagues of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, together with scientists from the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, carried out experiments with reed warblers to see how a situation of potential infidelity affects later paternal investment in the chicks and whether it does...