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Kinship and aggression: do house sparrows spare their relatives?

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Abstract

Kin-selection theory predicts that relatedness may reduce the level of aggression among competing group members, leading to indirect fitness benefits for kin-favoring individuals. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether relatedness affects aggressive behavior during social activities in captive house sparrow (Passer domesticus) flocks. We found that sparrows did not reduce their aggression towards kin, as neither the frequency nor the intensity of fights differed between close kin and unrelated flock-mates. Fighting success was also unrelated to kinship and the presence of relatives in the flock did not influence the birds’ dominance rank. These results suggest that the pay-offs of reduced aggression towards kin may be low in non-breeding flocks of sparrows, e.g. due to competition among relatives as predicted by a recent refinement of kin-selection theory. Our findings indicate that the significance of kin selection may be restricted in some social systems such as winter aggregations of birds.

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Acknowledgment

We thank Anna Kulcsár for the help with bird captures and data collection and Szabolcs Péter Tallósy for assistance in genetical analysis. We are grateful to István Sigmond and the staff of the Kittenberger Zoo, Veszprém, for putting two aviaries at our disposal and enabling our field work. The study was financially supported by a Hungarian Scientific Research Fund grant (T047256) and a PhD scholarship (10917031) to Z. T. Á.Z.L. was supported by a Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (PD76862).

Ethical standards

Our study complied with the current laws of Hungary, and the permission was provided by the Balaton Uplands National Park (permission number: 9135-2/2004).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Limnology, University of Pannonia, Egyetem u. 10, 8201, Veszprém, Hungary

    Zoltán Tóth, Veronika Bókony & András Liker

  2. Institute of Biology, College of Nyíregyháza, Sóstói u. 31/b, 4400, Nyíregyháza, Hungary

    Ádám Z. Lendvai

  3. Institute of Genetics, HAS Biological Research Center, Temesvári krt. 62, 6701, Szeged, Hungary

    Krisztián Szabó & Zsolt Pénzes

  4. Department of Ecology, University of Szeged, Közép fasor 52, 6701, Szeged, Hungary

    Zsolt Pénzes

Authors
  1. Zoltán Tóth
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  2. Veronika Bókony
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  3. Ádám Z. Lendvai
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  4. Krisztián Szabó
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  5. Zsolt Pénzes
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  6. András Liker
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zoltán Tóth.

Additional information

Communicated by I. Hartley

Electronic supplementary material

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Table A

Number of alleles, allele sizes, and their estimated frequencies in the seven highly polymorphic microsatellite loci for 61 house sparrows in our study (PDF 17 kb)

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Tóth, Z., Bókony, V., Lendvai, Á.Z. et al. Kinship and aggression: do house sparrows spare their relatives?. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 63, 1189–1196 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-009-0768-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-009-0768-8

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