High spatial pair cohesion during and after breeding in a socially monogamous territorial passerine

Frigg Janne Daan Speelman , Chris Tyson, Marc Naguib, Simon C. Griffith

Long-term social monogamy, a prevalent mating system in avian species, is often associated with increased cooperation and coordination as well as reduced sexual conflict. Although many studies have highlighted the benefits of long-term partnerships for individuals, there remains a lack of insight into how closely partners associate with one another behaviourally. To date, studies investigating pair cohesion in seasonal and long-term partnerships are typically restricted to arrivals at the nest or feeding sites during the breeding season. Using fine-scale automated tracking data on chirruping wedgebills (Psopodes cristatus), a territorial socially monogamous species, we characterised how partners coordinate their movement during and after the breeding season. We used 12 pair-bonded individuals with consistently high localisation rates that were tracked for a period between 32 and 69 days, with an average of 260,000 localisations per individual. We demonstrate that pairs (1) had extremely similar home ranges with a similarity index of 0.93 versus 0.18 for non-pairs, (2) maintained consistently closer proximity than expected from movement without paying attention to a partner, and (3) followed each other as they moved, with individuals following their moving partner in 42% of cases during and in 47% of cases after breeding. Our findings show that pair cohesion in socially monogamous territorial species can be very high in both a breeding and non-breeding context, illustrating that strong coordination among partners has important functions beyond reproduction and parental care.