Social regulation of reproduction: control or signal?

2023 · doi:10.32942/x2b59v
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⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-07, 2026-07-15 ⓘ

This paper proposes that social regulation of reproduction in multi-member groups operates along a continuum of signaling, rather than solely through top-down control by dominant individuals.

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⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-07, 2026-07-15 · read from full text ⓘ

The paper examines how reproductive skew conflicts in multimember social groups are resolved, questioning the traditional view that dominant individuals actively impose control (such as forced sterility in eusocial animals or suppression of sex change in sequential hermaphrodites). Using a broader multitaxon perspective, the authors propose a unifying framework in which reproductive regulation is better understood as signalling and strategic communication along a continuum, rather than direct physiological control. A stated limitation is that the synthesis is conceptual and comparative across taxa, rather than presenting new single-population experimental results. Relevance to endometriosis: the paper does not explicitly discuss endometriosis or adenomyosis; it was included in the corpus via a keyword match in the upstream search index.

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Abstract

Traditionally, dominant breeders have been considered able to control other individuals’ reproduction in multi-member groups with high variance in reproductive success/reproductive skew (e.g., forced sterility on subordinate conspecifics in eusocial animals; suppression of sex change in sequential hermaphrodites). These actions are typically presented as active impositions by reproductively dominant individuals. However, how can individuals regulate the physiological reproductive state of others? Alternatively, less reproductively successful individuals could self-restrain from reproduction in presence of dominant breeders. Shifting perspective from a top-down manipulation to a broader view (which includes all contestants) and using a multi-taxa approach, we propose a resolution of reproductive-skew conflicts based on signalling rather than control, along a continuum of levels of strategic regulation of reproduction.
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Abstract

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 DOI https://doi.org/10.32942/X2B59V Subjects Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Keywords

Eusociality, Hermaphroditism, Cooperative breeding, dominance, Communication, Social control Dates Published: 2023-01-13 08:43 Last Updated: 2023-06-29 21:40 Older Versions License CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Additional Metadata Conflict of interest statement: None Language: English Metrics Views: 710 Downloads: 861

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License: CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0