Confounding social and mating systems predictably lead to biased results when examining the evolution of cooperative breeding in cichlids: A response to Tanaka et al.

In 2017, we demonstrated that transitions to cooperative breeding in Lamprologine cichlid fishes were not related to a species’ social mating system (Dey et al. 2017. Nature Ecology & Evolution , 1 , 137). This contrasted previous evidence that monogamy (and a low degree of promiscuity) promoted transitions to cooperative breeding in other taxa. Recently, Tanaka et al. (2018. Ethology , 124 , 777–789) critiqued our study and argued that a...