No evidence for sibling or parent-offspring coadaptation in a wild population of blue tits, despite high power

Thomson, Caroline; Hadfield, Jarrod D.

doi:10.1111/evo.13642

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…Consequently, when parents are disassociated from their offspring by cross-fostering, both these generations should suffer fitness costs. Nevertheless, this has not been found in a recent powerful study (Thomson & Hadfield 2019). Similarly, we did not detect fitness differences between chicks in natural and crossfostered nests in a previous study based on a subsample of nests analysed here (Krist 2009).…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 90%

Parental provisioning is weakly age‐dependent and heritable in a small passerine

Krist,

Edme,

Höchsmannová

et al. 2024

Ibis

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Parental care in birds encompasses many behaviours, from selecting nest‐sites and supplying eggs with nutrients to incubation and offspring provisioning. Unlike the early stages, where offspring are passive receivers of care, chicks actively solicit care after hatching. This may lead to either parent–offspring conflict or coadaptation, or both, if there is genetic variance in both parental provisioning and offspring begging. However, given that parental provisioning is highly responsive to brood size and age, its genetic determination is questioned. In this study, we used a multigenerational pedigree and 11 years of provisioning data to dissect the variation in this trait in the Collared Flycatcher Ficedula albicollis, and to examine whether offspring provisioning changes as parents age. We found that the parental provisioning rate was weakly repeatable (r = 0.088–0.213) and heritable (h2 = 0.052–0.158). Higher values were obtained when calculated based on within‐individual averages rather than individual measurements, and after adjusting for fixed effects. Older parents provisioned offspring at a lower frequency than younger ones. An additive genetic component in provisioning indicates potential for the evolution of parental care, parent–offspring coadaptation and indirect genetic effects on offspring traits. Future studies employing new tracking technologies, including accelerometers, radars and radio‐frequency identification readers, may help to determine whether senescence or increased experience causes the lower rate of offspring provisioning observed in older parents.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 90%

Parental provisioning is weakly age‐dependent and heritable in a small passerine

Krist,

Edme,

Höchsmannová

et al. 2024

Ibis

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“…Nestlings were usually exchanged along with all or some of their siblings among two or three nests, without affecting the original brood size (Winney et al, 2015). We will assume that receiving foreign offspring does not affect parental provisioning (no effect was found in the males of our population: Lattore et al, 2019; no parent-offspring coadaptation was found in blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) despite high power: Lucass et al, 2016;Thomson and Hadfield, 2019). After this cross-fostering event, nestling were measured and weighed when between 4 and 6 days old (hatching = day 0).…”

Section: Parental Rearing Successmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rearing Success Does Not Improve With Apparent Pair Coordination in Offspring Provisioning

et al. 2019

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In species with biparental care, behavioral coordination in the provisioning of the progeny is hypothesized to increase the number of offspring that survive to independence. Coordination is often quantified by two metrics, alternation and synchrony. Turn-taking (leading to an alternation pattern) can result when one parent's investment strategy is based on the investment of its partner (i.e., conditional cooperation). This should increase the overall provisioning rate and improve offspring body condition. Synchrony might equalize food delivery among offspring and therefore decrease the variance in offspring body condition within the brood. Overall, offspring survival could be increased by parental coordination. Finally, pairs with low coordination, and with potentially lower reproductive success, are expected to be more likely to divorce. In this study, we use a dataset on 473 pairs of house sparrows in a natural insular population to test these hypotheses. We found no effect of the pair's apparent coordination on offspring condition, offspring survival, or divorce rate, questioning the adaptive significance of this behavior. We argue that, in this species, the detection of a higher frequency of alternation and synchrony, when compared to chance expectation, might be induced by the environment, rather than result from an emergent pair behavior selected for fitness benefits.

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“…In 2014-2015 a mixture of full and partial cross-fostering was used as part of a separate experiment. Full details of cross-fostering can be found in 103 . After egg laying was complete, nests were left undisturbed for 11 days and then checked daily for hatching.…”

Section: Study Populationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decomposing phenotypic skew and its effects on the predicted response to strong selection

et al. 2022

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the lab 12;23-28 and ad-hoc methods have been used to test for skew at the genetic level 29;30 . Nevertheless, to our knowledge, no study has 1) relaxed the normality assumptions when making statistical inferences to examine the origin and extent of skew at different levels, and 2) explored how observed patterns of natural selection interact with skew to determine how well these two equations predict selection response in the wild.Juvenile body size is under strong, persistent, directional selection across taxa 31 , yet is known to show little response to this selection 32 . We show that juvenile body size is highly negatively skewed (long tail of small individuals) across bird species, but the origin of this skew is unknown. To determine this, we developed statistical methods to decompose the phenotypic distribution into a set of skew-t distributions, and predict the shape of PO-regression based on the estimated skew. We applied these methods to data from a long-term cross-fostering experiment of a wild bird population. By estimating survival selection acting on juvenile body size, we tested the robustness of the predicted response to selection from the breeder's and gradient equations. Results Prevalence of Phenotypic SkewAcross 27 species of birds, tarsus length (a common measure of structural size) was substantially negatively skewed (long tail of small individuals) in juveniles (coefficient of skew: -1.054 [-1.394, -0.686], pMCMC<0.001), but not adults (-0.302 [-0.641, 0.052], pMCMC=0.086), with tarsus length being significantly more skewed in juveniles than adults (difference = -0.752

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No evidence for sibling or parent-offspring coadaptation in a wild population of blue tits, despite high power

Cited by 5 publications

References 63 publications

Parental provisioning is weakly age‐dependent and heritable in a small passerine

Parental provisioning is weakly age‐dependent and heritable in a small passerine

Rearing Success Does Not Improve With Apparent Pair Coordination in Offspring Provisioning

Decomposing phenotypic skew and its effects on the predicted response to strong selection

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