Favored parent–offspring trait combinations? On the interplay of parental and offspring traits

Carsten Lucass, Mareike Stöwe, Marcel Eens and Wendt Müller

Behavioral Ecology, 2016, vol. 27, issue 1, 134-140

Abstract: The expression of key traits like parental provisioning and offspring begging is confounded by the parent–offspring conflict in species with parental care, with offspring seeking greater parental investment than parents are willing to provide. Given the reciprocal interplay of these traits, selection has likely favored specific parent–offspring trait combinations, and it has been a longstanding question which party benefits most from this linkage. This will become apparent in a mismatch situation, which we here experimentally created by reciprocally cross-fostering blue tit broods. We hypothesized that offspring fledgling mass and their excreted corticosterone metabolite (CM) levels (reflecting stress) should vary with the rate of (foster) parental care (if provisioning is under full parental control), with offspring begging (if offspring is fully in control), or an interaction of both traits reflecting stable end points along a power continuum. We found a significant interaction effect, that is, highly demanding broods reached lowest fledgling mass when raised by low providing parents (due to partly unrewarded costly begging) but highest fledgling mass when raised by high providers. This pattern, however, was not reflected in offspring CM levels. Parental provisioning of the foster parents affected CM levels again in interaction with the offspring’s begging level, but this pattern may rather reflect intensity and frequency of sibling competition. Taken together, our results suggest that an adjustment of the offspring’s phenotype to the post-hatching social environment is primarily beneficial for highly demanding offspring and that parents have the upper hand (but probably not full control) over provisioning.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arv134 (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:27:y:2016:i:1:p:134-140.

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 ().