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Fitness costs associated with building and maintaining the burying beetle’s carrion nest

It is well-known that features of animal nest architecture can be explained by fitness benefits gained by the offspring housed within. Here we focus on the little-tested suggestion that the fitness costs associated with building and maintaining a nest should additionally account for aspects of its a...

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Autores principales: De Gasperin, Ornela, Duarte, Ana, Troscianko, Jolyon, Kilner, Rebecca M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5062497/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27734965
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep35293
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author De Gasperin, Ornela
Duarte, Ana
Troscianko, Jolyon
Kilner, Rebecca M.
author_facet De Gasperin, Ornela
Duarte, Ana
Troscianko, Jolyon
Kilner, Rebecca M.
author_sort De Gasperin, Ornela
collection PubMed
description It is well-known that features of animal nest architecture can be explained by fitness benefits gained by the offspring housed within. Here we focus on the little-tested suggestion that the fitness costs associated with building and maintaining a nest should additionally account for aspects of its architecture. Burying beetles prepare an edible nest for their young from a small vertebrate carcass, by ripping off any fur or feathers and rolling the flesh into a rounded ball. We found evidence that only larger beetles are able to construct rounder carcass nests, and that rounder carcass nests are associated with lower maintenance costs. Offspring success, however, was not explained by nest roundness. Our experiment thus provides rare support for the suggestion that construction and maintenance costs are key to understanding animal architecture.
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spelling pubmed-50624972016-10-24 Fitness costs associated with building and maintaining the burying beetle’s carrion nest De Gasperin, Ornela Duarte, Ana Troscianko, Jolyon Kilner, Rebecca M. Sci Rep Article It is well-known that features of animal nest architecture can be explained by fitness benefits gained by the offspring housed within. Here we focus on the little-tested suggestion that the fitness costs associated with building and maintaining a nest should additionally account for aspects of its architecture. Burying beetles prepare an edible nest for their young from a small vertebrate carcass, by ripping off any fur or feathers and rolling the flesh into a rounded ball. We found evidence that only larger beetles are able to construct rounder carcass nests, and that rounder carcass nests are associated with lower maintenance costs. Offspring success, however, was not explained by nest roundness. Our experiment thus provides rare support for the suggestion that construction and maintenance costs are key to understanding animal architecture. Nature Publishing Group 2016-10-13 /pmc/articles/PMC5062497/ /pubmed/27734965 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep35293 Text en Copyright © 2016, The Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
spellingShingle Article
De Gasperin, Ornela
Duarte, Ana
Troscianko, Jolyon
Kilner, Rebecca M.
Fitness costs associated with building and maintaining the burying beetle’s carrion nest
title Fitness costs associated with building and maintaining the burying beetle’s carrion nest
title_full Fitness costs associated with building and maintaining the burying beetle’s carrion nest
title_fullStr Fitness costs associated with building and maintaining the burying beetle’s carrion nest
title_full_unstemmed Fitness costs associated with building and maintaining the burying beetle’s carrion nest
title_short Fitness costs associated with building and maintaining the burying beetle’s carrion nest
title_sort fitness costs associated with building and maintaining the burying beetle’s carrion nest
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5062497/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27734965
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep35293
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