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A fixed agreement—consequences of brood size manipulation on alternation in blue tits

Recent studies have proposed that conditional cooperation may resolve sexual conflict over the amount of care provided by each parent. Such conditional cooperation may allow parents to equalize their investment by alternating their provisioning visits. This alternated pattern of male and female visi...

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Autores principales: Griffioen, Maaike, Müller, Wendt, Iserbyt, Arne
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6486810/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31086746
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.6826
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author Griffioen, Maaike
Müller, Wendt
Iserbyt, Arne
author_facet Griffioen, Maaike
Müller, Wendt
Iserbyt, Arne
author_sort Griffioen, Maaike
collection PubMed
description Recent studies have proposed that conditional cooperation may resolve sexual conflict over the amount of care provided by each parent. Such conditional cooperation may allow parents to equalize their investment by alternating their provisioning visits. This alternated pattern of male and female visits, that is, alternation, is thought to stimulate each other’s investment leading to higher levels of provisioning and potential benefits for offspring development. However, experimental studies testing the role of alternation as an adaptive parental strategy to negotiate the level of investment are still absent. Therefore, we manipulated blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) parents by temporarily changing their brood sizes to induce changes in demand and thus visit rates. Parents were expected to visit more—assuming that prey sizes were constant—and alternate at higher levels when confronted with an enlarged brood given the greater potential for sexual conflict. In contrast, in reduced broods visit rates and alternation may become lower due to the smaller investment that is needed for reduced broods. We show that the level of alternation did not differ in response to the manipulated brood sizes, despite a directional change in visit rates for enlarged and reduced broods as expected. Nestlings did not benefit from high levels of alternation as no effects on nestling mass gain were present in either of the different manipulations. These findings indicate that alternation does not serve as a mechanism to motivate each other to feed at higher rates. Parents hence appeared to be inflexible in their level of alternation. We therefore suggest that the level of alternation might reflect a fixed agreement about the relative investment by each of the caring parents.
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spelling pubmed-64868102019-05-13 A fixed agreement—consequences of brood size manipulation on alternation in blue tits Griffioen, Maaike Müller, Wendt Iserbyt, Arne PeerJ Animal Behavior Recent studies have proposed that conditional cooperation may resolve sexual conflict over the amount of care provided by each parent. Such conditional cooperation may allow parents to equalize their investment by alternating their provisioning visits. This alternated pattern of male and female visits, that is, alternation, is thought to stimulate each other’s investment leading to higher levels of provisioning and potential benefits for offspring development. However, experimental studies testing the role of alternation as an adaptive parental strategy to negotiate the level of investment are still absent. Therefore, we manipulated blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) parents by temporarily changing their brood sizes to induce changes in demand and thus visit rates. Parents were expected to visit more—assuming that prey sizes were constant—and alternate at higher levels when confronted with an enlarged brood given the greater potential for sexual conflict. In contrast, in reduced broods visit rates and alternation may become lower due to the smaller investment that is needed for reduced broods. We show that the level of alternation did not differ in response to the manipulated brood sizes, despite a directional change in visit rates for enlarged and reduced broods as expected. Nestlings did not benefit from high levels of alternation as no effects on nestling mass gain were present in either of the different manipulations. These findings indicate that alternation does not serve as a mechanism to motivate each other to feed at higher rates. Parents hence appeared to be inflexible in their level of alternation. We therefore suggest that the level of alternation might reflect a fixed agreement about the relative investment by each of the caring parents. PeerJ Inc. 2019-04-24 /pmc/articles/PMC6486810/ /pubmed/31086746 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.6826 Text en © 2019 Griffioen et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Animal Behavior
Griffioen, Maaike
Müller, Wendt
Iserbyt, Arne
A fixed agreement—consequences of brood size manipulation on alternation in blue tits
title A fixed agreement—consequences of brood size manipulation on alternation in blue tits
title_full A fixed agreement—consequences of brood size manipulation on alternation in blue tits
title_fullStr A fixed agreement—consequences of brood size manipulation on alternation in blue tits
title_full_unstemmed A fixed agreement—consequences of brood size manipulation on alternation in blue tits
title_short A fixed agreement—consequences of brood size manipulation on alternation in blue tits
title_sort fixed agreement—consequences of brood size manipulation on alternation in blue tits
topic Animal Behavior
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6486810/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31086746
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.6826
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