PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Inbreeding depression, the reduced fitness of offspring of closely related parents, is commonplace in both captive and wild populations and has important consequences for conservation and mating system evolution. However, because of the difficulty of collecting pedigree and life-history data from wild populations, relatively few studies have been able to compare inbreeding depression for traits at different points in the life cycle. Moreover, pedigrees give the expected proportion of the genome that is identical by descent (IBDg) whereas in theory with enough molecular markers realized IBDg can be quantified directly. We therefore investigated inbreeding depression for multiple life-history traits in a wild population of banded mongooses using pedigree-based inbreeding coefficients (f(ped)) and standardized multilocus heterozygosity (sMLH) measured at 35-43 microsatellites. Within an information theoretic framework, we evaluated support for either f(ped) or sMLH as inbreeding terms and used sequential regression to determine whether the residuals of sMLH on f(ped) explain fitness variation above and beyond f(ped). We found no evidence of inbreeding depression for survival, either before or after nutritional independence. By contrast, inbreeding was negatively associated with two quality-related traits, yearling body mass and annual male reproductive success. Yearling body mass was associated with f(ped) but not sMLH, while male annual reproductive success was best explained by both f(ped) and residual sMLH. Thus, our study not only uncovers variation in the extent to which different traits show inbreeding depression, but also reveals trait-specific differences in the ability of pedigrees and molecular markers to explain fitness variation and suggests that for certain traits, genetic markers may capture variation in realized IBDg above and beyond the pedigree expectation.