Blue-Footed Boobies Sibling Conflict and Sexual Infidelity on a Tropical Island : Sibling Conflict and Sexual Infidelity on a Tropical Island - Hugh Drummond

Blue-Footed Boobies Sibling Conflict and Sexual Infidelity on a Tropical Island

Sibling Conflict and Sexual Infidelity on a Tropical Island

By: Hugh Drummond

Hardcover | 22 September 2023

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In Blue-Footed Boobies, Hugh Drummond presents a lifetime field study of one of the planet's most charismatic and observable birds, focused on two themes of human relevance: aggressive competition between siblings and monogamous pair-bonding combined with frequent infidelity. In an account peppered with research anecdotes, he immerses readers in a bustling blue-footed booby colony where social manipulation and life-and-death dramas are the stuff of family life.

Here, dominant elder chicks prefer to bully their siblings into abject submission rather than killing them and younger siblings' susceptibility to subordination is an evolved ability. The narrative expands to survey the colorful strategies used by young birds and mammals to compete with siblings ruthlessly, with restraint or with courtly manners, scrutinize the role of parents in sibling conflict, and assess the lifetime impacts of bullying on those that survive.

Next, a compelling eye-witness account of monogamous partnerships in blue-foots reveals a world disturbingly familiar to humans. After displaying their beauty and physical prowess to each other, females and males select partners and commit to months of relentless parental care, sharing duties and making decisions jointly. Half of them renew their bond the following year, and renewers are more efficient and successful than first-time partners. But colonies of bonded blue-foot pairs are hotbeds of infidelity Nearly all females and males carry on semi-secret liaisons with 1-3 neighbors, roughly one third of them copulate repeatedly with those extra partners, and one in ten males ends up caring for another male's chick. Countermeasures include surveillance, aggression and partner-switching, and males unsure of paternity sometimes resort to infanticide. Drummond discusses a panoply of plausible biological functions of infidelity.

Sibling competition and sexual conflict are widespread in animal species in which two partners raise contemporaneous offspring together, and notorious in humans. In the final chapter Drummond argues for a common evolutionary cause in the blue-foot and human lineages, despite the psychology of their behavior being quite different: whereas boobies thoughtlessly follow routines of predictable actions, humans experience inclinations and urges they can implement in diverse ways, or choose to veto.

Industry Reviews
"This book is a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in Blue-footed Boobies!" -- Bird Book Report "Hugh Drummond's account of intrafamilial conflict in Blue-footed Boobies and other animals is a delight to read, and is well-illustrated with many colour photographs (mostly by the author), and beautiful line drawings by Jaime Zaldivar-Rae. It will not only be of interest to researchers in evolutionary and behavioural ecology, but also to ornithologists and those interested in animal behaviour in general."--Geoff Parker, Ibis "There is probably no one who knows as much about Blue-footed Boobies (Sula nebouxii) as does Hugh Drummond, having spent a lifetime studying them. The depth of his knowledge, from his and his students' work on booby behavior, sibling rivalry, and sexual infidelity is truly impressive. For anyone who has had questions about what a booby is doing, why it might be doing it, and how the behavior evolved, this is the book to read."--E.A. Schreiber, Ornithology "This book is largely aimed at informing, educating, inspiring and entertaining nonspecialists, and in this it will succeed."--Pat Monaghan, Animal Behaviour

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