Mechanisms of inbreeding avoidance in a wild primate.

Inbreeding often imposes net fitness costs, leading to the expectation that animals will engage in inbreeding avoidance when the costs of doing so are not prohibitive. However, one recent meta-analysis indicates that animals of many species do not avoid mating with kin in experimental settings, and another reports that behavioral inbreeding avoidance generally evolves only when kin regularly encounter each other and inbreeding costs are high. These results raise questions about the processes that separate kin, how these processes depend on kin class and context, and whether kin classes differ in how effectively they avoid inbreeding via mate choice-in turn, demanding detailed demographic and behavioral data within individual populations.