A diagnosis model of parental care:How parents optimize their provisioning strategy in brood reduction?

Altricial birds often display biased preferences in providing parental care for their dependent offspring,especially during food shortages.During this process,such inflexible rules may result in provisioning errors.To demonstrate how parents optimize their provisioning strategies,we proposed a“diagnosis model”of parental care to posit that parents will undergo a diagnosis procedure to test whether selecting against some particular offspring based on phenotype is an optimal strategy.We tested this model in an asynchronous hatching bird,the Azure-winged Magpie Cyanopica cyanus,based on 10 years of data about demography and parental provisioning behaviors.Given their higher daily survival rates,core offspring(those hatched on the first day)merits an investment priority compared with their marginal brood mates(those hatched on later days).However,a marginal offspring also merited a priority if it displayed greater weight gain than the expected value at the early post-hatching days.Parents could detect such a marginal offspring via a diagnosis strategy,in which they provisioned the brood at the diagnosis stage by delivering food to every nestling that begged,then biased food toward high-value nestlings at the subsequent decision stage by making a negative response to the begging of low-value nestlings.In this provisioning strategy,the growth performance of a nestling became a more reliable indicator of its investment value than its hatching order or competitive ability.Our findings provide evidence for this“diagnosis model of parental care”wherein parents use a diagnosis method to optimize their provisioning strategy in brood reduction.

Fitness consequences of divorce in the azure-winged magpie depends on the breeding experience of a new mate

Sexual conflict in producing and raising offspring is a critical issue in evolutionary ecology research.Individual experience affects their breeding performance,as measured by such traits of provisioning of offspring and engagement in extra-pair copulations,and may cause an imbalance in sexual conflict.Thus,divorce is hypothesized to occur within aged social pairs,irrespective of current reproductive success.This concept was explored in the azure-winged magpie Cyanopica cyanus by investigating the divorce of a social pair and its relationship to their changes in breeding performance with prior experience.Females engaging in extra-pair copulation may intensify sexual conflicts and may be the main reason for divorce.Once divorced,females repairing with an inexperienced male realized higher reproductive success than that repairing with an experienced male;males repairing with an experienced female realized higher reproductive success than that repairing with an inexperienced female.This finding indicates that the fitness consequence of divorce depends on the breeding experience of new mates.Divorced females can obtain more extra-pair copulations,whereas divorced males cannot,when they repair with inexperienced breeders.Divorced females provisioned a brood at lower rates than inexperienced females whereas divorced males had no such difference.It appears that divorced females can obtain an advantage in sexual conflicts with inexperienced mates in future reproduction.Consequently,females are probably more active than males in divorcing their aged mates so as to select an inexperienced male as a new mate.Azure-winged magpies thus provide novel insights into the implicaticns of sexual conflict in birds.

Parental dependence on the nest's spatial cues in offspring recognition decreases with nestling growth in the azure-winged magpie

In altricial birds,to address which cues are used by parents to recognize their offspring,and when they switch between cues during reproduction,it has not been well determined.In this study,we address this questi on in a Tibetan populatio n of the azure-winged magpie Cyanopica cyan us f by examining the dependence of parents on a nest's spatial position in offspring recognition.During the egg and nestling phases,azure-winged magpie nests were translocated to new positions across various distances from their original site,and parental responses to the translocated nests were investigated.Our findings show that a nesfs spatial position is not connected with the survival of its young,but might be used as a cue in parental offspring recognition.When nests are translocated to a new position within a certain distance,parents could recognize their nests and returned to resume their parenting behaviors.Parental dependence on the nest's spatial position in offspring recognition is higher during the egg phase than during the nestling phase,and it decreases with the growth of nestlings.After nestlings reach a certain age,the nest's spatial position was no longer used by pare nts as the single cue for offspring recog nition.These findings suggest that azure-winged magpies switch their cues in offspring recog nition during the differe nt stages of reproduction.After parent-offspring communication has been established,the offspring's phenotypic traits may become a more reliable cue than the nests spatial position in offspring recognition.

Fecal consumption by adults of altricial birds in relation to the temporal change in nestling gut microbiota

Nest sanitation behavior of altricial birds has been selected to reduce the exposure of young to pathogens,parasites,or predators,and thus to maintain the health and safety of nestlings(Guigueno and Sealy 2012).During the process of nest sanitation,caregivers either carry away the fecal sacs of nestlings or directly eat them.Given that adults endure higher risk of being infected by pathogens during fecal consumption(Potti et al.2007),it remains a puzzle about why adults consume the nestling feces when they can transport them.Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the fecal consumption behavior of altricial birds,including the nutrition hypothesis(Gliick 1988),economic hypothesis(Hurd et al.1991),and predation hypothesis(Ibanez-Alamo et al.2013).