Testing the Conditional Cooperation Model: What Can We Learn From Parents Taking Turns When Feeding Offspring?

Santema, Peter; Schlicht, Emmi; Kempenaers, Bart

doi:10.3389/fevo.2019.00094

Cited by 20 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 23 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This would be the most extreme case of conditional cooperation, which would require a very precise monitoring of the partner. On the other hand, environmental change at a very fine scale could lead to a similar correlation between partners within a very short time-frame (Santema et al, 2019). For instance, rapidly changing environmental conditions (such as the presence of a predator) could influence both partners to have a long interval, and then both partners again to have a short interval.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, it is not surprising that within-individual directional change over the course of a long nest watch (e.g., continuously increasing or decreasing provisioning speed) was not observed in the studies of Johnstone et al (2016) and Savage et al (2017). In addition, and most importantly, it is not the directional change of one pair member (temporal autocorrelation) that creates patterns of alternation: it is the correlation between the pair members' patterns of inter-visit intervals (Schlicht et al, 2016;Santema et al, 2019). We will sometimes refer to this as "correlation in directional changes" (Box 1).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Measuring Up to Reality: Null Models and Analysis Simulations to Study Parental Coordination Over Provisioning Offspring

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Behavioral coordination when provisioning offspring, through alternation and synchrony, has been hypothesized to influence rearing success. However, studying coordination at the pair level presents two analytical difficulties. First, alternating or synchronous (i.e., simultaneous) feeding can occur randomly and be induced by a shared environment. Therefore, a null model must account for this apparent coordination that occurs by chance. Second, alternation and synchrony in provisioning are intrinsically linked to the rate of provisioning itself, and the effects of coordination and provisioning rate, for instance on fitness, need to be distinguished. In this paper, we explore several randomization procedures and simulation scenarios to tease apart true coordination from random alternation and synchrony, and to find an appropriate statistical model for analyzing coordination. First, to establish a baseline of alternated or synchronous visits expected by chance, we took data from a natural population of house sparrows and randomized inter-feeding intervals in various ways. Alternation and synchrony in the observed dataset were higher than expected by chance under any of our randomizations. However, it was impossible to exclude that alternation and synchrony patterns did not arise due to the pair's shared environment. Second, to identify a way of statistically modeling coordination without generating spurious effects due to intrinsic mathematical relationships between coordination and provisioning rates, we simulated data according to different scenarios. Only one out of five candidate models for analyzing alternation was deemed appropriate, and gave similarly appropriate results for analyzing synchrony. This work highlights the importance and difficulty of finding an adequate null model for studying behavioral coordination and other emergent behaviors. In addition, it demonstrates that analyzing simulated data, prior to analyzing empirical data, enables researchers to avoid spurious effects.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Up to Reality: Null Models and Analysis Simulations to Study Parental Coordination Over Provisioning Offspring

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Synchrony at the nest may also be due to synchrony of foraging, possibly improving the probability of finding food in patchy environments expected in harsh environments Griffith, 2012, 2015). Short-term changes in weather might also cause correlated changes in the visit rates of both parents, which are not accounted for by randomisations, and hence are included in coordination scores (Ihle et al, 2019;Santema et al, 2019). In addition to weather, habitat tree diversity may also influence the quantity and quality of food available which in turn could impact patterns of parental feeding.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition to weather, habitat tree diversity may also influence the quantity and quality of food available which in turn could impact patterns of parental feeding. Birds in high quality habitats travel shorter distances between nest visits, which may increase feeding rates (European starlings Sturnus vulgaris: Wright et al, 1998;blue tits C. caeruleus: Tremblay et al, 2005) and increase fledging mass (Santema et al, 2019). Tree species richness is positively related to the abundance and diversity of certain insect groups in temperate forests (Gering and Crist, 2000;Sobek et al, 2009).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental Effects on Parental Care Visitation Patterns in Blue Tits Cyanistes caeruleus

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Such coordinated feeding visits have been found in a number of observational studies (Johnstone et al, 2014;Bebbington and Hatchwell, 2016;Koenig and Walters, 2016;Iserbyt et al, 2017Iserbyt et al, , 2018Savage et al, 2017;Leniowski and Wegrzyn, 2018;Wojczulanis-Jakubas et al, 2018), but the number of studies testing the significance of conditional cooperation for conflict resolution remains limited (but see Griffioen et al, 2019;Iserbyt et al, 2019). Experiments are vital for our understanding of conditional cooperation given the analytical difficulties faced in observational studies that may prevent to prove whether parents actively take turns (Schlicht et al, 2016;Ihle et al, 2019;Santema et al, 2019). That is, turn taking could also arise from variation in the refractory period (Johnstone et al, 2014;Savage et al, 2017) or from correlated male and female inter-visit intervals (Schlicht et al, 2016; but see Johnstone et al, 2016;Savage et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Handicapping Males Does Not Affect Their Rate of Parental Provisioning, but Impinges on Their Partners' Turn Taking Behavior

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Parents in biparental bird species have a conflict about how much each of them should invest in the current brood to optimize their reproductive success while not being exploited. Recently, it has been hypothesized that parents might attempt to resolve this conflict via taking turns in their provisioning visits. This implies that an individual will increase its working rate when their partner does, and that they will react with a delay in feeding if the partner starts delaying its visit. Experimental studies testing whether turn taking represents a behavioral strategy are surprisingly scarce and focus on the outcome of turn taking which are alternated visits. However, the adaptive significance of turn taking strongly relies on the response to a partner that increases or reduces care. Therefore, we investigate whether parents use the turn taking rules by performing an experimental manipulation on only one of the parents. To this end, we handicapped male blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) by feather clipping and recorded parental feeding behavior. Surprisingly, handicapped males did not have lower visit rates or altered turn taking levels, whilst their female partners had higher visit rates and lower turn taking levels when compared to the control. Females responded to the handicap of their partners, which likely reduced the males' parental capacity, but the females' response was independent of the males' rate of provisioning. Our study highlights that behavioral strategies are flexible within pairs and that these can change at the individual level in response to sudden changes in individual state.

show abstract

Testing the Conditional Cooperation Model: What Can We Learn From Parents Taking Turns When Feeding Offspring?

Cited by 20 publications

References 23 publications

Measuring Up to Reality: Null Models and Analysis Simulations to Study Parental Coordination Over Provisioning Offspring

Measuring Up to Reality: Null Models and Analysis Simulations to Study Parental Coordination Over Provisioning Offspring

Environmental Effects on Parental Care Visitation Patterns in Blue Tits Cyanistes caeruleus

Handicapping Males Does Not Affect Their Rate of Parental Provisioning, but Impinges on Their Partners' Turn Taking Behavior

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About