Age-related parental care in a long-lived bird: implications for offspring development

Ortega, Santiago; Sánchez-Macouzet, Oscar; Urrutia, Andrea; Rodrı́guez, Cristina; Drummond, Hugh

doi:10.1007/s00265-017-2364-7

Cited by 11 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…terminal investment: Clutton‐Brock, 1984). However, we also included age 2 in the models because in long‐lived species the relationship between age and FID is expected to follow a U‐pattern (Møller & Nielsen, 2014; Ortega et al., 2017). Hence, we expected that risk‐taking would first increase with age and then gradually decline to values associated with lower fitness.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

State dependence explains individual variation in nest defence behaviour in a long‐lived bird

Jong

Nicolaus

Fokkema

et al. 2021

Journal of Animal Ecology

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Parental care, such as nest or offspring defence, is crucial for offspring survival in many species. Yet, despite its obvious fitness benefits, the level of defence can consistently vary between individuals of the same species. One prominent adaptive explanation for consistent individual differences in behaviours involves state dependency: relatively stable differences in individual state should lead to the emergence of repeatable behavioural variation whereas changes in state should lead to a readjustment of behaviour. Therefore, empirical testing of adaptive state dependence requires longitudinal data where behaviour and state of individuals of the same population are repeatedly measured. Here, we test if variation in states predicts nest defence behaviour (a ‘risky’ behaviour) in a long‐lived species, the barnacle goose Branta leucopsis. Adaptive models have predicted that an individual's residual reproductive value or ‘asset’ is an important state variable underlying variation in risk‐taking behaviour. Hence, we investigate how nest defence varies as a function of time of the season and individual age, two state variables that can vary between and within individuals and determine asset. Repeated measures of nest defence towards a human intruder (flight initiation distance or FID) of females of known age were collected during 15 breeding seasons. Increasing values of FID represent increasing shyness. We found that females strongly and consistently differed in FID within‐ and between‐years. As predicted by theory, females adjusted their behaviour to state by decreasing their FID with season and age. Decomposing these population patterns into within‐ and between‐individual effects showed that the state‐dependent change in FID was driven by individual plasticity in FID and that bolder females were more plastic than shyer females. This study shows that nest defence behaviour differs consistently among individuals and is adjusted to individual state in a direction predicted by adaptive personality theory.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

State dependence explains individual variation in nest defence behaviour in a long‐lived bird

Jong

Nicolaus

Fokkema

et al. 2021

Journal of Animal Ecology

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“…Alternatively, the variation in tick abundance with combined parental ages could be driven by parental care, which varies with parental age in this species (Ortega et al . ). Young and old avian parents sometimes provision eggs or feed chicks poorly (Saino et al .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Alternatively, the variation in tick abundance with combined parental ages could be driven by parental care, which varies with parental age in this species (Ortega et al 2017). Young and old avian parents sometimes provision eggs or feed chicks poorly (Saino et al 2002 In theory, pairs of young parents or old parents might increase their offspring's exposure to ticks by bearing a heavy tick load due to age-dependent deficiencies in immunocompetence, chemical defences or hygienic behaviour or by occupying heavily infested nest-sites.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ectoparasite burden of Blue‐footed Booby chicks depends on combined parental ages

Ramos

Drummond

2018

Ibis

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The probability of Blue‐footed Booby Sula nebouxii fledglings becoming reproductive adults is maximal when one parent is old and the other young, and minimal when both are old or young. No mechanism has been identified to explain this pattern, but here we showed that nestlings with different‐aged parents are the least infested with ticks. This result constitutes preliminary confirmation of the hypothesis that the effect of combined parental ages on probability of recruitment is mediated by offspring immunocompetence. The contribution of immunocompetence and parental care to these parental age effects needs to be unravelled.

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“…Parental care often requires substantial investment of time and energy, and strongly impacts the fitness of the individual carers that provide it (Saether, 1994). Previous studies have shown that care behavior is influenced by individual characteristics such as sex (Liker et al, 2015), age (Ortega et al, 2017), condition (Dearborn, 2001), and personality (Westneat et al, 2011). However, many studies only measure the amount contributed by each carer within one behavioral dimension of care (e.g., food delivery) and during one stage of offspring development (e.g., provisioning nestlings).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Can We Quantify About Carer Behavior?

Savage

Hinde

2019

Front. Ecol. Evol.

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In many species, individuals must contribute extensively to offspring care to reproduce successfully. Within species, variation in care is driven by local social, physiological, and environmental contexts, and this relationship has been a major focus of behavioral ecology since the inception of the field. The majority of existing studies on care, both theoretical and empirical, have focused on measuring the amount of care delivered by each carer as a proxy for individual investment, linking this investment to the local context, and investigating outcomes for offspring. However, more recently interest has grown in the finer-scale details of care, including how individuals respond to each other's behavior, and temporal variation in care both within and between stages. Simultaneously, advances in remote monitoring methods, such as video cameras and passive integrated transponder (PIT) tag systems, have vastly increased the ease of collecting large amounts of care data, providing opportunities to study carer behavior in much greater detail than previously possible. In this mini-review we provide an overview of the dimensions of carer behavior that can be quantified, illustrated using recent studies from a variety of taxa. We classify these analyses into three broad groups: (a) how parental care is distributed in time, (b) variation within care events, and (c) how carers interact when jointly providing care. Our aim is to encourage more in-depth analyses of parental care, to build a more complete picture of how animals rear their offspring.

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Age-related parental care in a long-lived bird: implications for offspring development

Cited by 11 publications

References 26 publications

State dependence explains individual variation in nest defence behaviour in a long‐lived bird

State dependence explains individual variation in nest defence behaviour in a long‐lived bird

Ectoparasite burden of Blue‐footed Booby chicks depends on combined parental ages

What Can We Quantify About Carer Behavior?

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