Whoever their partner, female blue tits breed the same

Ségolène Delaitre, Claire Doutrelant and Samuel P Caro

Behavioral Ecology, 2024, vol. 35, issue 1, 617-619

Abstract: Do females modify their reproductive investment if they do not succeed in pairing with a male that matches their preference? In a two-year experiment, we asked female blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) to select among six males, and then successively paired them with their preferred and their most avoided male. We monitored female reproductive investment through nest building activity, timing of breeding, size and number of eggs, number of fertilized eggs, and brood sex ratio. We found that females preferred males with a chromatic coloration (blue UV chroma of the head crown) that matched their own, but also that they preferred males with a lower achromatic coloration (less bright color of the cheeks and head crown). Although females paired with their preferred males tended to build heavier nests during the breeding season, we found no evidence of an effect of the pairing treatment on timing of breeding, or any other aspects of female reproductive investment. We however found that laying dates, clutch sizes, egg sizes, and brood sex ratio were significantly repeatable within females between the two years, despite the opposite pairing treatments. These findings show that in female blue tits, the males with which they are paired do not substantially alter their reproductive decisions.

Keywords: birds; clutch size; laying date; mate preference; reproduction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arad082 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:35:y:2024:i:1:p:617-619.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().