{"doi":"10.1093/evolut/qpad199","title":"The impact of helping experience on helper life-history and fitness in a cooperatively breeding bird","abstract":"<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>\n               <jats:p>Cooperative breeding occurs when helpers provide alloparental care to the offspring of a breeding pair. One hypothesis of why helping occurs is that helpers gain valuable skills that may increase their own future reproductive success. However, research typically focuses on the effect of helping on short-term measures of reproductive success. Fewer studies have considered how helping affects long-term fitness measures. Here, we analyze how helping experience affects key breeding and fitness-related parameters in the Seychelles warbler (Acrocephalus sechellensis). Importantly, we control for females that have cobred (reproduced as a subordinate by laying an egg within a territory in which they are not a dominant breeder), as they already have experience with direct reproduction. Helping experience had no significant association with any of the metrics considered, except that helpers had an older age at first dominance. Accounting for helping experience, females that had cobred produced more adult offspring (≥1 year) after acquiring dominance and had a higher lifetime reproductive success (LRS) than females that had never cobred. Our results suggest that, in the Seychelles warbler, helping experience alone does not increase the fitness of helpers in any of the metrics considered, and highlights the importance of separating the effects of helping from cobreeding. Our findings also emphasize the importance of analyzing the effect of helping at various life-history stages, as higher short-term fitness may not translate to an overall increase in LRS.</jats:p>","journal":"Evolution","year":2024,"id":35175,"datarank":0.3530382767612995,"base_score":1.9459101490553132,"endowment":1.9459101490553132,"self_citation_contribution":0.29188652235829704,"citation_network_contribution":0.06115175440300248,"self_endowment_contribution":0.29188652235829704,"citer_contribution":0.06115175440300248,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":6,"citer_count":3,"citers_with_citation_signal":3,"citers_with_endowment":3,"datacite_reuse_total":1,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":null,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":false,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":null,"fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":180735,"name":"Alexandra M Sparks","orcid":"0000-0002-7697-4632","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":125358,"name":"Terry Burke","orcid":"0000-0003-3848-1244","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":180639,"name":"Jan Komdeur","orcid":"0000-0002-9241-0124","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":180736,"name":"David S Richardson","orcid":"0000-0001-7226-9074","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":180662,"name":"Hannah Dugdale","orcid":"0000-0001-8769-0099","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":180660,"name":"Ellie Chesterton","orcid":"0000-0002-6978-4996","position":0,"is_corresponding":false}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":{"has_enrichment":true,"base_score":1.9459101490553132,"endowment":1.9459101490553132,"datacite_reuse_total":1,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"views":0,"has_version_chain":false,"is_dataset":false,"is_oa":false,"pmid":"37948581","pmcid":null,"openalex_id":"https://openalex.org/W4388557289","authors":[],"funders":[{"funder_name":"NWO","grant_id":"825.09.013","title":"To breed or not to breed: fitness consequences and heritability of life-history decisions in the Seychelles warbler"},{"funder_name":"Natural Environment Research Council","grant_id":"NE/Y005430/1","title":null},{"funder_name":"Natural Environment Research Council","grant_id":"NE/V003860/1","title":null},{"funder_name":"Natural Environment Research Council","grant_id":"NE/B504106/1","title":null},{"funder_name":"Natural Environment Research Council","grant_id":"NE/F02083X/1","title":null},{"funder_name":"Natural Environment Research Council","grant_id":"NE/K005502/1","title":"Transgenerational impacts on senescence: quantitative genetics of cellular and organismal ageing in the wild"},{"funder_name":"Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)","grant_id":"040.11.232","title":"Quantitative genetics of social behaviours. Dr. H.L. Dugdale. Bezoeker: Dr. H.L. Dugdale."},{"funder_name":"Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)","grant_id":"823.01.014","title":"Trans-generational impacts on senescence: quantitative genetics of cellular and organismal senescence in the wild"},{"funder_name":"UK Research and Innovation","grant_id":"NE/P011284/1","title":"Understanding determinants of individual variation in senescence in a natural population"},{"funder_name":"Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)","grant_id":"854.11.003","title":"The uphill struggle to understand social behaviour: the importance of genes, ecology and evolution"},{"funder_name":"UK Research and Innovation","grant_id":"NE/I021748/1","title":"Quantitative genetics of behaviour: cooperative breeding and lifetime fitness"},{"funder_name":"Leeds Doctoral Scholarship","grant_id":"","title":null},{"funder_name":"Climate Research Bursary Fund","grant_id":"","title":null},{"funder_name":"University of Leeds","grant_id":"","title":null},{"funder_name":"Lucie Burgers Foundation","grant_id":"","title":null},{"funder_name":"Leeds Doctoral Scholarship","grant_id":"","title":null},{"funder_name":"Climate Research Bursary Fund","grant_id":"","title":null},{"funder_name":"University of Leeds","grant_id":"","title":null},{"funder_name":"Lucie Burgers Foundation","grant_id":"","title":null}],"total_grants":19,"fwci":3.454,"citation_percentile":0.92178588,"influential_citations":0,"citation_trend":[{"year":2024,"count":1},{"year":2025,"count":4},{"year":2026,"count":1}],"oa_status":"hybrid","license":"cc-by","oa_locations":[{"url":"https://academic.oup.com/evolut/advance-article-pdf/doi/10.1093/evolut/qpad199/53097764/qpad199.pdf","host_type":"journal"},{"url":"https://academic.oup.com/evolut/advance-article-pdf/doi/10.1093/evolut/qpad199/53097764/qpad199.pdf","host_type":"HYBRID"},{"url":"https://academic.oup.com/evolut/advance-article-pdf/doi/10.1093/evolut/qpad199/53097764/qpad199.pdf","host_type":"publisher"},{"url":"https://academic.oup.com/evolut/advance-article-pdf/doi/10.1093/evolut/qpad199/56708417/qpad199.pdf","host_type":"publisher"},{"url":"https://academic.oup.com/evolut/article-pdf/78/4/690/57089434/qpad199.pdf","host_type":"publisher"},{"url":"https://doi.org/10.1093/evolut/qpad199","host_type":"journal"},{"url":"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37948581","host_type":"repository"},{"url":"https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/210736/1/qpad199.pdf","host_type":"repository"},{"url":"https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/dbd70556-e085-42fd-a756-b7632c09a41c","host_type":"repository"},{"url":"https://hdl.handle.net/11370/dbd70556-e085-42fd-a756-b7632c09a41c","host_type":"repository"},{"url":"https://research.rug.nl/files/1004973182/qpad199_1_.pdf","host_type":"repository"},{"url":"https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/98447/1/qpad199.pdf","host_type":""},{"url":"https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/210736/","host_type":""},{"url":"https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/evolut/qpad199","host_type":""}],"fields_of_study":["Animal Behavior and Reproduction","Plant and animal studies","Avian ecology and behavior","Medicine","Biology","Environmental Science","Animals","Female","Songbirds","Passeriformes","Reproduction","Life Cycle Stages","Cooperative Behavior","Helping Behavior"],"mesh_terms":["Animals","Cooperative Behavior","Female","Helping Behavior","Life Cycle Stages","Reproduction","Songbirds","Passeriformes"],"keywords":["Cooperative breeding","Acrocephalus","Reproductive success","Biology","Helping behavior","Dominance (genetics)","Offspring","Breeding pair","Inclusive fitness","Demography","Ecology","Evolutionary biology","Population","Genetics","Lifetime Reproductive Success","Seychelles Warbler","Skills Hypothesis","Cobreeding","Helper Fitness Benefits","Life Cycle Stages","Reproduction","590","610","Songbirds","Animals","Female","Passeriformes","Cooperative Behavior"],"sdg_mappings":[],"linked_datasets":[{"doi":"10.5061/dryad.ht76hdrnd","title":"The impact of helping experience on helper life-history and fitness in a cooperatively breeding bird","publisher":"Dryad","resource_type":"Dataset"}],"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"database_accessions":[],"source":"live","citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-06-10T01:57:03.288941Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}