Early social and ecological experience triggers divergent reproductive investment strategies in a cooperative breeder

Unlike eusocial systems, which are characterized by reproductive division of labour, cooperative breeders were predicted not to exhibit any reproductive specialization early in life. Nevertheless, also cooperative breeders face a major life-history decision between dispersal and independent breeding vs staying as helper on the natal territory, which might affect their reproductive strategies. In the cooperatively-breeding cichlid Neolamprologus pulcher early-life social and predator experiences induce two behavioural types differing in later-life social and dispersal behaviour. We performed a long-term breeding experiment to test whether the two early-life behavioural types differ in their reproductive investment. We found that the early-dispersing type laid fewer and smaller eggs, and thus invested overall less in reproduction, compared to the philopatric type. Thus N. pulcher had specialised already shortly after birth for a dispersal and reproductive strategy, which is in sharp contrast to the proposition that reproductively totipotent cooperative breeders should avoid reproductive specialization before adulthood.