Tropical birds take small risks

Anders Pape Møller and Wei Liang

Behavioral Ecology, 2013, vol. 24, issue 1, 267-272

Abstract: The life history of tropical birds differs from that of their temperate counterparts by late start of reproduction, small clutch sizes, and high rates of adult survival. Thus, tropical species should have greater residual reproductive value than temperate species. Therefore, tropical birds can be predicted to take smaller risks than closely related temperate birds in order not to jeopardize their prospects of survival, which is the single most important component of fitness, and which is greater in tropical than in temperate species. We estimated flight distances as a measure of risk-taking behavior of common species of birds for populations living in tropical areas in China (mainly Hainan) and in temperate Europe (mainly Denmark and France), predicting that flight distances should be longer in tropical than in temperate populations, and that the difference in flight distance between these 2 environments should be positively correlated with the difference in clutch size. Mean flight distance was more than twice as large in tropical compared with temperate populations for 25 pairs of taxa. The difference in flight distance between tropical and temperate taxa decreased with the difference in clutch size between the 2 environments. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that tropical birds take smaller risks than closely related temperate taxa to minimize the risk of early death due to predation.

Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/ars163 (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:24:y:2013:i:1:p:267-272.

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 ().