Evidence for conditional cooperation in biparental care systems? A comment on Johnstone et al.

Schlicht, Emmi; Santema, Peter; Schlicht, Robert; Kempenaers, Bart

doi:10.1093/beheco/arw036

Cited by 28 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 5 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Our data cleaning procedure is also applicable for other blue tit populations, given the similarity in both peaks of the data distributions between our and a German blue tit population (time spent in the nest box: 8–15 s; time spent between visits: 40–100 sec; Santema et al., ). The cutoff time may further be applicable for great tits as well, since average time spent in the nest box is less than 30 s in >90% of all great tit visits (Wilkin et al., ) and the time between visits peaks around 90 s (Johnstone et al., ; Schlicht, Santema, Schlicht, & Kempenaers, ). This suggests that our cutoff rule may be applicable for other studies that aim to quantify provisioning behavior of great and blue tits which are important model species in behavioral ecological research, yet validation is advised.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to quantify animal activity from radio‐frequency identification (RFID) recordings

Iserbyt

Griffioen

Borremans

et al. 2018

Ecology and Evolution

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Automated animal monitoring via radio‐frequency identification (RFID) technology allows efficient and extensive data sampling of individual activity levels and is therefore commonly used for ecological research. However, processing RFID data is still a largely unresolved problem, which potentially leads to inaccurate estimates for behavioral activity. One of the major challenges during data processing is to isolate independent behavioral actions from a set of superfluous, nonindependent detections. As a case study, individual blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) were simultaneously monitored during reproduction with both video recordings and RFID technology. We demonstrated how RFID data can be processed based on the time spent in‐ and outside a nest box. We then validated the number and timing of nest visits obtained from the processed RFID dataset by calibration against video recordings. The video observations revealed a limited overlap between the time spent in‐ and outside the nest box, with the least overlap at 23 s for both sexes. We then isolated exact arrival times from redundant RFID registrations by erasing all successive registrations within 23 s after the preceding registration. After aligning the processed RFID data with the corresponding video recordings, we observed a high accuracy in three behavioral estimates of parental care (individual nest visit rates, within‐pair alternation and synchronization of nest visits). We provide a clear guideline for future studies that aim to implement RFID technology in their research. We argue that our suggested RFID data processing procedure improves the precision of behavioral estimates, despite some inevitable drawbacks inherent to the technology. Our method is useful, not only for other cavity breeding birds, but for a wide range of (in)vertebrate species that are large enough to be fitted with a tag and that regularly pass near or through a fixed antenna.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to quantify animal activity from radio‐frequency identification (RFID) recordings

Iserbyt

Griffioen

Borremans

et al. 2018

Ecology and Evolution

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It is true that the re-ordering of inter-visit intervals removes any pattern in the visit sequence that results from parents responding to each other's behavior. However, it also takes away any correlation between male and female visit behavior that results from both parents responding to the same external stimuli (Schlicht et al, 2016). The "chance" scenario against which the observational data are compared is thus not only stripped of the effect that parents may have on each other (necessary to test for conditional cooperation), but also from any other factors that may have introduced a correlation between the inter-visit intervals of both parents.…”

Section: The Problem With Randomizing Inter-visit Intervalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2019

Self Cite

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%

“…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). The only two manipulation studies so far have targeted both parents via brood size manipulations (Griffioen et al, 2019) or via temporal removal of one parent (Iserbyt et al, 2019) and investigated the effect on pair alternation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Evidence for conditional cooperation in biparental care systems? A comment on Johnstone et al.

Cited by 28 publications

References 5 publications

How to quantify animal activity from radio‐frequency identification (RFID) recordings

How to quantify animal activity from radio‐frequency identification (RFID) recordings

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

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

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About