Are brood sex ratios adaptive?-The effect of experimentally altered brood sex ratio on nestling growth, mortality and recruitment.

ABSTRACT: Brood sex ratios (BSRs) have often been found to be nonrandom in respect of parental and environmental quality, and many hypotheses suggest that nonrandom sex ratios can be adaptive. To specifically test the adaptive value of biased BSRs, it is crucial to disentangle the consequences of BSR and maternal effects. In multiparous species, this requires cross-fostering experiments where foster parents rear offspring originating from multiple broods, and where the interactive effect of original and manipulated BSR on fitness components is tested. To our knowledge, our study on collared flycatchers (Ficedula albicollis) is the first that meets these requirements. In this species, where BSRs had previously been shown to be related to parental characteristics, we altered the original BSR of the pa

SUBMITTER: Szasz E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10099815 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature