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The cost of prospecting for dispersal opportunities in a social bird

Understanding why individuals delay dispersal and become subordinates within a group is central to studying the evolution of sociality. Hypotheses predict that dispersal decisions are influenced by costs of extra-territorial prospecting that are often required to find a breeding vacancy. Little is k...

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Autores principales: Kingma, Sjouke A., Komdeur, Jan, Hammers, Martijn, Richardson, David S.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4938056/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27330175
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2016.0316
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author Kingma, Sjouke A.
Komdeur, Jan
Hammers, Martijn
Richardson, David S.
author_facet Kingma, Sjouke A.
Komdeur, Jan
Hammers, Martijn
Richardson, David S.
author_sort Kingma, Sjouke A.
collection PubMed
description Understanding why individuals delay dispersal and become subordinates within a group is central to studying the evolution of sociality. Hypotheses predict that dispersal decisions are influenced by costs of extra-territorial prospecting that are often required to find a breeding vacancy. Little is known about such costs, partly because it is complicated to demonstrate them empirically. For example, prospecting individuals may be of inferior quality already before prospecting and/or have been evicted. Moreover, costs of prospecting are mainly studied in species where prospectors suffer from predation risk, so how costly prospecting is when predators are absent remains unclear. Here, we determine a cost of prospecting for subordinate Seychelles warblers, Acrocephalus sechellensis, in a population where predators are absent and individuals return to their resident territory after prospecting. Prospecting individuals had 5.2% lower body mass than non-prospecting individuals. Our evidence suggests this may be owing to frequent attacks by resident conspecifics, likely leading to reduced food intake by prospectors. These results support the hypothesis that energetic costs associated with dispersal opportunities are one factor influencing dispersal decisions and shaping the evolution of delayed dispersal in social animals.
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spelling pubmed-49380562016-07-15 The cost of prospecting for dispersal opportunities in a social bird Kingma, Sjouke A. Komdeur, Jan Hammers, Martijn Richardson, David S. Biol Lett Animal Behaviour Understanding why individuals delay dispersal and become subordinates within a group is central to studying the evolution of sociality. Hypotheses predict that dispersal decisions are influenced by costs of extra-territorial prospecting that are often required to find a breeding vacancy. Little is known about such costs, partly because it is complicated to demonstrate them empirically. For example, prospecting individuals may be of inferior quality already before prospecting and/or have been evicted. Moreover, costs of prospecting are mainly studied in species where prospectors suffer from predation risk, so how costly prospecting is when predators are absent remains unclear. Here, we determine a cost of prospecting for subordinate Seychelles warblers, Acrocephalus sechellensis, in a population where predators are absent and individuals return to their resident territory after prospecting. Prospecting individuals had 5.2% lower body mass than non-prospecting individuals. Our evidence suggests this may be owing to frequent attacks by resident conspecifics, likely leading to reduced food intake by prospectors. These results support the hypothesis that energetic costs associated with dispersal opportunities are one factor influencing dispersal decisions and shaping the evolution of delayed dispersal in social animals. The Royal Society 2016-06 /pmc/articles/PMC4938056/ /pubmed/27330175 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2016.0316 Text en © 2016 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Animal Behaviour
Kingma, Sjouke A.
Komdeur, Jan
Hammers, Martijn
Richardson, David S.
The cost of prospecting for dispersal opportunities in a social bird
title The cost of prospecting for dispersal opportunities in a social bird
title_full The cost of prospecting for dispersal opportunities in a social bird
title_fullStr The cost of prospecting for dispersal opportunities in a social bird
title_full_unstemmed The cost of prospecting for dispersal opportunities in a social bird
title_short The cost of prospecting for dispersal opportunities in a social bird
title_sort cost of prospecting for dispersal opportunities in a social bird
topic Animal Behaviour
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4938056/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27330175
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2016.0316
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