Whilst the immune system often varies seasonally and exhibits differences between males and females, the general patterns in seasonality and sex differences across taxa have remained controversial. Birds are excellent model organisms to assess these patterns, because the immune system of many species is well characterised. We conducted a meta-analysis using 41 wild bird species from 24 avian families to investigate sex differences and seasonal (breeding/non-breeding) variations in immune status, including white blood cell counts, phytohaemagglutinin (PHA) test, bacteria-killing ability (BKA), haemolysis and haemagglutination assays. We found male-biased macrophage concentration, BKA and haemolysis titers, but only during the breeding season. Sex-specific heterophil concentrations, heterophil/lymphocyte ratios and PHA responses differed between breeding and non-breeding, suggesting larger changes in males than in females. Importantly, sex differences in immune status are stronger during the breeding period than during the non-breeding period. Taken together, our study suggests that both seasonal variation and sex differences in immune system are common in birds, although their associations are more complex than previously thought.

Social monogamy has evolved multiple times and is particularly common in birds. However, it is not well understood why some species live in long‐lasting monogamous partnerships while others change mates between breeding attempts. Here, we investigate mate fidelity in a sequential polygamous shorebird, the snowy plover (Charadrius nivosus), a species in which both males and females may have several breeding attempts within a breeding season with the same or different mates. Using 6 years of data from a well‐monitored population in Bahía de Ceuta, Mexico, we investigated predictors and fitness implications of mate fidelity both within and between years. We show that in order to maximize reproductive success within a season, individuals divorce after successful nesting and re‐mate with the same partner after nest failure. Therefore, divorced plovers, counterintuitively, achieve higher reproductive success than individuals that retain their mate. We also show that different mating decisions between sexes predict different breeding dispersal patterns. Taken together, our findings imply that divorce is an adaptive strategy to improve reproductive success in a stochastic environment. Understanding mate fidelity is important for the evolution of monogamy and polygamy, and these mating behaviors have implications for reproductive success and population productivity.

Background The allocation of resources between offspring size and number is a central question of life-history theory. Although several studies have tested the existence of this trade-off, few studies have investigated how environmental variation influences the allocation of resources to offspring size and offspring number. Additionally, the relationship between population dynamics and the offspring size and number allocation is far less understood. Methods We investigate whether resource allocation between egg size and clutch size is influenced by the ambient temperature and whether it may be related to apparent nest survival rate. We measured 1548 eggs from 541 nests of two closely related shorebird species, the Kentish Plover (Charadrius alexandrinus) and the White-faced Plover (C. dealbatus) in China, in four populations that exhibit contrasting ambient environments. We weighed females, monitored nest survival, and calculated the variance of ambient temperature. Results Although we found that egg size and clutch size were all different between the four breeding populations, the reproductive investment (i.e. total clutch volume) was similar between populations. We also found that populations with a high survival rate had relatively larger eggs and a smaller clutch than populations with a low nest survival rate. The latter result is in line with a conservative/diversified bet-hedging strategy. Conclusions Our findings suggest that plovers may increasing fitness by investing fewer, larger or many, small according local nest survival rate to make a similar investment in reproduction, and thereby may have an impact on population demography.

When individuals breed more than once, parents are faced with the choice of whether to re-mate with their old partner or divorce and select a new mate. Evolutionary theory predicts that, following successful reproduction with a given partner, that partner should be retained for future reproduction. However, recent work in a polygamous bird, has instead indicated that successful parents divorced more often than failed breeders (Halimubieke et al. in Ecol Evol 9:10734–10745, 2019), because one parent can benefit by mating with a new partner and reproducing shortly after divorce. Here we investigate whether successful breeding predicts divorce using data from 14 well-monitored populations of plovers (Charadrius spp.). We show that successful nesting leads to divorce, whereas nest failure leads to retention of the mate for follow-up breeding. Plovers that divorced their partners and simultaneously deserted their broods produced more offspring within a season than parents that retained their mate. Our work provides a counterpoint to theoretical expectations that divorce is triggered by low reproductive success, and supports adaptive explanations of divorce as a strategy to improve individual reproductive success. In addition, we show that temperature may modulate these costs and benefits, and contribute to dynamic variation in patterns of divorce across plover breeding systems.

Correct assessment of species limits and phylogenetic relationships is a prerequisite for studies in ecology and evolution. Even in well-studied groups such as birds, species delimitation often remains controversial. Traditional avian taxonomy is usually based on morphology, which might be misleading because of the contingent nature of evolutionary diversification. The sand plover complex (genus Charadrius) may be such an example wherein 2 Lesser Sand Plover C. mongolus subspecies groups have been proposed to comprise 2 species. We use genome-wide data of 765K SNPs to show that the widely accepted taxonomic treatment of this sand plover complex appears to be a paraphyletic grouping, with two Lesser Sand Plover subspecies groups found not to be each other’s closest relatives, and with the mongolus subspecies group being the sister taxon of Greater Sand Plover C. leschenaultii. Based on genomic and acoustic analyses, we propose a three-way split of the Sand Plover complex into the Siberian Sand Plover C. mongolus, Tibetan Sand Plover C. atrifrons, and Greater Sand Plover C. leschenaultii. The similar sizes of the Siberian and Tibetan Sand plovers may be the result of niche conservatism coupled with rapid morphological and ecological differentiation in the Greater Sand Plover. Gene flow between the non-sister Tibetan and Greater Sand plovers might have happened in phases of secondary contact as a consequence of climate-driven range expansions. We call for further studies of the Sand Plover complex, and suggest that speciation with intermittent gene flow is more common in birds than currently acknowledged.