Does cooperation increase helpers' later success as breeders? A test of the skills hypothesis in the cooperatively displaying lance-tailed manakin.
Experience improves individual performance in many tasks. Pre-breeding cooperation may provide important experience that improves later success as a breeder, offering one compelling explanation for why some individuals delay reproduction to help others breed (the 'skills hypothesis'). However, confounding effects of age, quality and alternative selective benefits have complicated rigorous tests of this hypothesis. Male lance-tailed manakins perform cooperative courtship displays involving partnerships between unrelated alpha and beta males, and alphas monopolize resulting copulations. Beta males therefore do not receive immediate direct or indirect fitness benefits, but may gain skills during cooperation that increase their later success as an alpha. To date, however, the effect of cooperative experience on later success as a breeder has never been tested in any cooperatively displaying taxon. The effects of prior cooperative experience on reproductive success of alpha lance-tailed manakins were analysed in a mixed model framework using 12 years of information on cooperative experience and annual and lifetime genetic reproductive success for 57 alpha males. Models included previously identified effects of age and alpha tenure. Individual-level random effects controlled for quality differences to test for an independent influence of beta experience on success. Males accumulated up to 5 years of beta experience before becoming alphas, but 42·1% of alphas had no prior beta experience. Betas became alphas later in life, and experienced significantly lower reproductive success in their final year as alpha than males that were never beta, but did not have higher lifetime success or longer alpha tenures. Differences in patterns of annual siring success were best explained by age-dependent patterns of reproductive improvement and senescence among alphas, not beta experience. Cooperative experience does not increase relative breeding success for male lance-tailed manakins. Importantly, beta cooperation seems to be an alternative reproductive tactic that yields fitness payoffs equivalent to a non-cooperative route to alpha status, if population growth rate is stable.