Male New Zealand robins (Petroica longipes) cater to their mate’s desire when sharing food in the wild

Abstract

In many species that have bi-parental care, food-sharing males provide vital nutritional resources to their mates during reproduction. However, it is currently unknown whether females can signal specific desires to their mates, or if males can cater to female desire in the wild. Here we investigate whether and how wild male North Island robins (Petroica longipes) respond to changes in their mates' desires and nutritional need when sharing food. We demonstrate that wild female robins' desire for particular foods changes over short time periods; when given the choice between two types of insect larvae, females prefer the type they have not recently eaten. In our experiments, wild male robins preferentially shared the larvae type that their mate was most likely to desire and also increased the quantity of food shared if she had begun incubating. Males catered to their mates' desire when female behaviour was the only cue available to guide their choices. This is the first evidence that females may behaviourally communicate their specific food desires to their mates, enabling males to cater to fine-scale changes in their mates' nutritional requirements in the wild. Such a simple behaviour-reading mechanism has the potential to be widespread among other food-sharing species.

Azure-winged magpies’ decisions to share food are contingent on the presence or absence of food for the recipient

“…These findings corroborate findings on another corvid, Eurasian jays 31 and yet another bird species, New Zealand robins 33 , and are at par with findings on chimpanzees 43 and capuchin monkeys 71 . The studies on the Eurasian jays, New Zealand Robins and chimpanzees, however, have also been shown to flexibly adjust their help/sharing based somehow on the current desire of their conspecific 31,33,43 . Whether azure-winged magpies can do so too requires further testing.…”

Memory Performance Influences Male Reproductive Success in a Wild Bird

“…Toutouwai regularly consume some of the largest invertebrates on earth [19] and will cache year round, with a peak in intensity in winter, particularly for males [20]. These bold and curious birds are highly territorial, traits that make wild, free-living individuals amenable to cognitive testing across a range of domains [21][22][23] as well as easily monitored during the breeding season [24]. During the austral winter (June 2016), we measured individuals' (N males = 36, N females = 27) performance in an associative-learning task in which a spatial cue signaled the presence of a reward [25].…”

Prostaglanin-E2 Potentiates the Suppressive Functions of Human Mononuclear Myeloid-Derived Suppressor Cells and Increases Their Capacity to Expand IL-10-Producing Regulatory T Cell Subsets

“…GM-CSF/IL-6-based protocols induced much lower percentage CD209 + cells, and in the absence of PGE2, GM-CSF, and IL-6 induced a higher expression of CD206. Although more specific in mice, some studies suggested that CD206 is a marker of human M2 macrophages generated from monocytes in the presence of M-CSF, but not in the presence of GM-CSF knowing to induce M1 type macrophages ( 54 , 55 ). In contrast, other reports suggested that high expression of CD209 better correlates with the M2 phenotype of human macrophages ( 56 ).…”

“…However, GM-CSF/IL-6 M-MDSC also produced increased levels of IL-10 and displayed suppressive capacity in the co-cultures with allogeneic PBMC and T cells, all of which mark M2 type macrophages ( 54 , 55 , 58 ). Unlike the standard protocols for macrophages differentiation ( 54 – 56 ), we used IL-6 and IL-6/PGE2 from the beginning of differentiation, and about 23% and 43% of these cells, respectively, lacked the expression of HLA-DR, which is the main reason for designating them as M-MDSC, rather than macrophages. It is not clear at the moment whether additional stages of myeloid cell differentiation are present in our M-MDSC population and to which extent.…”