Banded mongooses play a delicate balancing act between incest and warfare. Some females have to choose between mating with a relative within their own social group or trying to sneakily mate with a male from a rival group during fights between groups. We show that females are more likely to mate with extra-group males when the risk of inbreeding within their group is high, but not all females get this opportunity for extra-group mating.

Full details of data collection are provided in the methods section of "Extra-group paternity varies with proxies of relatedness in a social mammal with high inbreeding risk" in Behavioural Ecology.

See the methods section for details of how data was collected and analysed. This data is NOT standardised. Before fitting models, these data were standardised by subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation.

Data is a .csv (comma separated value) file, each row is a single maternal litter of banded mongooses describing the conditions of the litter's dam at conception. This dataset was used to investigate extra-group breeding behaviour in female banded mongooses. The analyses were performed on this dataset using R. Note that this data is NOT standardised. Before fitting models, these data were standardised by subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation.

Description of columns:

clutch: aka maternal litter, id code for a litter of a single dam

groupsize: The number of individuals over six months old in the breeding female’s group at conception.

pack_year: aka group age, Time between the first time the social group was observed (usually the point at which the group formed) and the time the maternal litter was conceived.

dam_in_np: Was the dam in her natal group at conception? Females still in the group they were born in when they conceived were said to be in their natal group.

r_tr_na_mates: relatedness to top ranked males, The average pedigree relatedness of a focal female to males of the top three age ranks (assuming they are over 6 months old) and immigrants to the population.

age: age of breeding female at conception

bexp: Were any pups in the maternal litter (clutch) fathered by a male which was not in the breeding female’s social group at the time of conception (in either the second or third month before birth).

clutchf: The average inbreeding coefficient of a maternal litter measured by pedigree.

clutchsmlh: The average inbreeding coefficient of a maternal litter measured by microsatellite standardised multilocus heterozygosity.

dam_conception_pack: The social group the dam was in at conception

dam: The identity of the dam

litter: The identitiy of the "Communal litter" (Collective term for all pups in a group born during a single breeding event.) NOTE, microsoft excel interprets some of these codes as dates and automatically converts them.