Halliwell, C. orcid.org/0000-0002-2223-3097, Beckerman, A.P. orcid.org/0000-0002-4797-9143, Patrick, S.C. et al. (1 more author) (2024) Coordination of care reduces conflict and predation risk in a cooperatively breeding bird. Evolution Letters, 8 (6). pp. 764-773. ISSN 2056-3744
Abstract
When two or more individuals cooperate to provision a shared brood, each carer may be able to maximize their payoffs by coordinating provisioning in relation to what others are doing. This investment “game” is not simply a matter of how much to invest but also of the relative timing of investment. Recent studies propose that temporal coordination of care in the forms of alternation (i.e., turn-taking) and synchrony (i.e., provisioning together) function to mitigate conflict between carers and reduce brood predation risk, respectively. Such coordination is widespread in biparental and cooperatively breeding birds, yet the fitness consequences have rarely been empirically tested. Here, we use a long-term study of long-tailed tits Aegithalos caudatus, a facultative cooperatively breeding bird with active coordination of care, to assess the support for these hypothesized functions for coordination of provisioning visits. First, we found evidence that turn-taking mitigates conflict between carers because, in cooperative groups, provisioning rates and offspring recruitment increased with the level of active alternation exhibited by carers and with the associated increase in provisioning rate parity between carers. In contrast, offspring recruitment did not increase with alternation in biparental nests, although it was positively correlated with parity of provisioning between carers, which is predicted to result from conflict mitigation. Second, synchronous nest visits were associated with a reduced probability of nest predation and thus increased brood survival, especially when provisioning rates were high. We attribute this effect to synchrony reducing carer activity near the nest. We conclude that temporal coordination of provisioning visits in the forms of alternation and synchrony both confer fitness benefits on carers and despite being intrinsically linked, these different kinds of coordination appear to serve different functions.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) and European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEN). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com. |
Keywords: | alternation; brood; predation; conflict; cooperation; coordination; synchrony |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) > Department of Animal and Plant Sciences (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number NATURAL ENVIRONMENT RESEARCH COUNCIL NE/R001669/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 17 Oct 2024 07:19 |
Last Modified: | 16 Dec 2024 11:44 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press (OUP) |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1093/evlett/qrae031 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:218446 |