Reciprocity and conditional cooperation between great tit parents

Johnstone, Rufus A.; Manica, Andrea; Fayet, Annette L.; Stoddard, Mary Caswell; Rodríguez‐Gironés, Miguel A.; Hinde, Camilla A.

doi:10.1093/beheco/art109

Cited by 106 publications

(262 citation statements)

References 39 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

223

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…It is likely that partner coordination as a strategy to improve provisioning efficiency is widespread and not restricted to cooperative breeders or those species in which partners breed together multiple times. For example, a recent study on great tits Parus major, another model species for biparental care but with short pair bond duration, found that partners coordinate parental care by systematically alternating visits at the nest (Johnstone et al 2014). Considering pair coordination in models of sexual conflict may therefore considerably improve theoretical predictions relative to the evolution of parental care.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Adaptive Significance of Provisioning and Foraging Coordination between Breeding Partners

Mariette

Griffith

2015

The American Naturalist

104

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sexual conflict over parental care relies on the fundamental assumption that parents do not share the cost of their partner's effort on future reproduction. However, this is unlikely to be true whenever partners breed together more than once. In that case, individuals should try to optimize the cost and benefits for the pair, rather than only for themselves. Here we seek to establish whether the synchronization of parents' provisioning visits to the nest could fulfill this function. We conducted a brood-size manipulation experiment on wild zebra finches to test whether nest visit synchrony was flexible and beneficial for nestlings' growth, while controlling for the confounding effects of pair "quality" and synchrony away from the nest during foraging. Using a network of readers to track parents at nests and feeding stations, we found that nest visit synchrony responded directly to the brood manipulation and increased with brood size. Synchrony at the nest and while foraging were correlated, but the latter better predicted nestling mass, possibly because it was associated with more regular provisioning patterns. Our findings suggest that parental coordination could indeed play an important role in partners' investment decisions, underpinning the evolution of the most prominent mating system in birds.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Adaptive Significance of Provisioning and Foraging Coordination between Breeding Partners

Mariette

Griffith

2015

The American Naturalist

104

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, it is plausible that some of these transitions are largely (or entirely) the result of changes in male and/or female behavior as they are trying to resolve the conflict. First, for a given set of costs and benefits, multiple patterns of care may occur in a population; this may be the result of mixed evolutionarily stable strategies (ESSs) (Webb et al 1999), to different behavioral interactions between parents Johnstone et al 2014), or to social interactions between parents and other members of a population that can stabilize different ESSs in a coevolutionary process that involves mate choice, mating behavior, and parental care (McNamara et al 2000;van Dijk et al 2012). Second, an important insight from evolutionary game theory is that as males (or females) attempt to attain their respective fitness optima, they may change the cost and benefit functions for their mates, and thus influence the fitness landscape for the opposite sex (McNamara and Weissing 2010).…”

Section: T Szé Kelymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unlike divorce in humans that can be an extended and convoluted process, desertion in nonhuman animals can be rapid . Studies are needed to work out on a behavioral scale how parents interact, whether they may escalate or converge in response to each other's behavior (Johnstone et al 2014).…”

Section: T Szé Kely Box 1 Conflict and Cooperation Between Kentish mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Male and female parents may monitor each other's behavior, and alter their own strategy in response to the other parent. Such repeated interactions ("negotiation") Lessells 2012) have received much theoretical attention, although how these interactions play out in nature is not known in detail (but see Johnstone et al 2014). …”

Section: Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Third, parental care was (and is) one of the test beds of evolutionary game theory. Numerous models have been developed to understand how parents interact with each other and with their offspring (Trivers 1972;Maynard Smith 1977;Houston and Davies 1985;Balshine-Earn and Earn 1998;McNamara et al 1999McNamara et al , 2000Webb et al 1999;Johnstone and Hinde 2006;Johnstone et al 2014). Parental care research is one field in which empiricists are extensively testing the predictions of evolutionary game theoretic models in both the laboratory and wild populations (Székely et al 1996;Balshine-Earn and Earn 1998;Harrison et al 2009;Klug et al 2012;Lessells 2012;van Dijk et al 2012), although the congruence between theoretical and empirical work is not as tight as often assumed (Houston et al 2013).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Sexual Conflict between Parents: Offspring Desertion and Asymmetrical Parental Care

Székely

2014

Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Parental care is an immensely variable social behavior, and sexual conflict offers a powerful paradigm to understand this diversity. Conflict over care (usually considered as a type of postzygotic sexual conflict) is common, because the evolutionary interests of male and female parents are rarely identical. I investigate how sexual conflict over care may facilitate the emergence and maintenance of diverse parenting strategies and argue that researchers should combine two fundamental concepts in social behavior to understand care patterns: cooperation and conflict. Behavioral evidence of conflict over care is well established, studies have estimated specific fitness implications of conflict for males or females, and experiments have investigated specific components of conflict. However, studies are long overdue to reveal the full implications of conflict for both males and females. Manipulating (or harming) the opposite sex seems less common in postzygotic conflicts than in prezygotic conflicts because by manipulating, coercing, or harming the opposite sex, the reproductive interest of the actor is also reduced. Parental care is a complex trait, although few studies have yet considered the implications of multidimensionality for parental conflict. Future research in parental conflict will benefit from understanding the behavioral interactions between male and female parents (e.g., negotiation, learning, and coercion), the genetic and neurogenomic bases of parental behavior, and the influence of social environment on parental strategies. Empirical studies are needed to put sexual conflict in a population context and reveal feedback between mate choice, pair bonds and parenting strategies, and their demographic consequences for the population such as mortalities and sex ratios. Taken together, sexual conflict offers a fascinating avenue for understanding the causes and consequences of parenting behavior, sex roles, and breeding system evolution.

show abstract

Sex roles in nest keeping – how information asymmetry contributes to parent‐offspring co‐adaptation

Lucass

Fresneau

Eens

et al. 2016

Ecology and Evolution

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Parental food provisioning and offspring begging influence each other reciprocally. This makes both traits agents and targets of selection, which may ultimately lead to co‐adaptation. The latter may reflect co‐adapted parent and offspring genotypes or could be due to maternal effects. Maternal effects are in turn likely to facilitate in particular mother‐offspring co‐adaptation, further emphasized by the possibility that mothers are sometimes found to be more responsive to offspring need. However, parents may not only differ in their sensitivity, but often play different roles in postnatal care. This potentially impinges on the access to information about offspring need. We here manipulated the information on offspring need as perceived by parents by playing back begging calls at a constant frequency in the nest‐box of blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus). We measured the parental response in provisioning to our treatment, paying particular attention to sex differences in parental roles and whether such differences alter the perception of the intensity of our manipulation. This enabled us to investigate whether an information asymmetry about offspring need exists between parents and how such an asymmetry relates to co‐adaptation between parental provisioning and offspring begging. Our results show that parents indeed differed in the frequency how often they perceived the playback due to the fact that females spent more time with their offspring in the nest box. Correcting for the effective exposure of an adult to the playback, the parental response in provisioning covaried more strongly (positive) with offspring begging intensity, independent of the parental sex, indicating coadaptation on the phenotypic level. Females were not more sensitive to experimentally increased offspring need than males, but they were exposed to more broadcasted begging calls. Therefore, sex differences in access to information about offspring need, due to different parental roles, have the potential to impinge on family conflicts and their resolution.

show abstract

Reciprocity and conditional cooperation between great tit parents

Cited by 106 publications

References 39 publications

The Adaptive Significance of Provisioning and Foraging Coordination between Breeding Partners

The Adaptive Significance of Provisioning and Foraging Coordination between Breeding Partners

Sexual Conflict between Parents: Offspring Desertion and Asymmetrical Parental Care

Sex roles in nest keeping – how information asymmetry contributes to parent‐offspring co‐adaptation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About