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Perceived threat to paternity reduces likelihood of paternal provisioning in house wrens.

ABSTRACT: Biparental care is a critical and, occasionally, unequally shared obligation that ensures that young survive to maturity. Such care may be complicated in systems in which one parent, typically the male, is unsure of his genetic relatedness to the young. Males may reduce paternal provisioning when full paternity is not assured, as occurs in mating systems in which females engage in extrapair copulations. Moreover, other factors independent of extrapair matings, such as male personality traits, likely also affect the level of paternal care. In this study, we determined the effect of a paternity threat event (i.e., a conspecific or a heterospecific territory intrusion) and male personality (i.e., the level of aggressiveness) on provisioning effort by male house wrens (Troglodytes aedon). Males were more likely to attack a conspecific intruder than a heterospecific intruder. Males that were exposed to a conspecific intruder were less likely to provision young at all. Of those males that did feed the young in their nest, male aggressiveness did not relate to feeding effort. These findings suggest that the likelihood of paternal care is reduced by perceived threats to paternity but that the costs of not feeding potentially multisired young are high and feeding efforts are unrelated to male personality.

SUBMITTER: DiSciullo RA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6765381 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep-Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Perceived threat to paternity reduces likelihood of paternal provisioning in house wrens.

DiSciullo Rachael A RA Thompson Charles F CF Sakaluk Scott K SK

Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology 20190605 5

Biparental care is a critical and, occasionally, unequally shared obligation that ensures that young survive to maturity. Such care may be complicated in systems in which one parent, typically the male, is unsure of his genetic relatedness to the young. Males may reduce paternal provisioning when full paternity is not assured, as occurs in mating systems in which females engage in extrapair copulations. Moreover, other factors independent of extrapair matings, such as male personality traits, li ...[more]

PMID: 31579364

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Project description:BackgroundLife-history studies of wild bird populations often focus on the relationship between an individual's condition and its capacity to mount an immune response, as measured by a commonly-employed assay of cutaneous immunity, the PHA skin test. In addition, haematocrit, the packed cell volume in relation to total blood volume, is often measured as an indicator of physiological performance. A multi-year study of a wild population of house wrens has recently revealed that those exhibiting the highest condition and strongest PHA responses as nestlings are most likely to be recruited to the breeding population and to breed through two years of age; in contrast, intermediate haematocrit values result in the highest recruitment to the population. Selection theory would predict, therefore, that most of the underlying genetic variation in these traits should be exhausted resulting in low heritability, although such traits may also exhibit low heritability because of increased residual variance. Here, we examine the genetic and environmental variation in condition, cutaneous immunity, and haematocrit using an animal model based on a pedigree of approximately 2,800 house wrens.ResultsEnvironmental effects played a paramount role in shaping the expression of the fitness-related traits measured in this wild population, but two of them, condition and haematocrit, retained significant heritable variation. Condition was also positively correlated with both the PHA response and haematocrit, but in the absence of any significant genetic correlations, it appears that this covariance arises through parallel effects of the environment acting on this suite of traits.ConclusionsThe maintenance of genetic variation in different measures of condition appears to be a pervasive feature of wild bird populations, in contradiction of conventional selection theory. A major challenge in future studies will be to explain how such variation persists in the face of the directional selection acting on condition in house wrens and other species.

Project description:Corticosterone plays a central role in maintaining homeostasis, promoting energy acquisition, and regulating the stress response in birds. Exposure to elevated levels of corticosterone during development can profoundly alter offspring behaviour and physiology, but the effects of elevated maternal corticosterone on offspring development remain poorly understood.We tested two competing hypotheses concerning the effect of maternally derived corticosterone on growth and development of free-living house wrens: (i) elevated maternal corticosterone causes damaging effects on nestling phenotype and fitness (collateral damage hypothesis) and (ii) increased maternal corticosterone enhances offspring fitness by preparing nestlings for the environment experienced by their mother (environmental/maternal-matching hypothesis).We used a non-invasive means to increase maternal corticosterone by providing females with corticosterone-injected mealworms prior to and during egg production in the absence of any overt pre-natal maternal stress. To disentangle pre- and post-natal effects of this elevation in maternal corticosterone, we cross-fostered young in two experiments: (i) nestlings of control and experimental females were reared by unmanipulated, natural females in a uniform maternal environment; (ii) a split-brood design that enabled us to assess the interaction between the mother's corticosterone treatment and that of the nestlings.There were significant pre-natal effects of increased maternal corticosterone on nestling growth and survival. Offspring of females experiencing experimentally increased corticosterone were heavier and larger than offspring of control females. There also was a significant interaction between maternal corticosterone treatment and the corticosterone treatment to which young were exposed within the egg in their effect on nestling survival while in the nest; experimental young exhibited greater survival than control young, but only when reared by control mothers. There was also a significant effect of maternal corticosterone treatment on nestling stress reactivity and, in both experiments, on the eventual recruitment of offspring as breeding adults in the local population.These patterns are broadly consistent with the environmental/maternal-matching hypothesis, and highlight the importance of disentangling pre- and post-natal effects of manipulations of maternal hormone levels on offspring phenotype.

Dataset Information

Perceived threat to paternity reduces likelihood of paternal provisioning in house wrens.

Publications

Perceived threat to paternity reduces likelihood of paternal provisioning in house wrens.

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