Chiara Benvenuto, Maria Cristina Lorenzi

Traditionally, dominant breeders have been considered to be able to control the reproduction of other individuals in multimember groups that have high variance in reproductive success/reproductive skew (e.g., forced sterility/coercion of conspecifics in eusocial animals; sex-change suppression in sequential hermaphrodites). These actions are typically presented as active impositions by reproductively dominant individuals. However, how can individuals regulate the reproductive physiology of others? Alternatively, all contestants make reproductive decisions, and less successful individuals self-downregulate reproduction in the presence of dominant breeders. Shifting perspective from a top-down manipulation to a broader view, which includes all contenders, and using a multitaxon approach, we propose a unifying framework for the resolution of reproductive skew conflicts based on signalling rather than control, along a continuum of levels of strategic regulation of reproduction