Food supply and provisioning behavior of parents: Are small hoopoe nestlings condemned to die?

ABSTRACT: Parents might use signals of need or of quality to decide food provisioning among their offspring, while the use of one or another signal might depend on food availability. Begging success of nestlings of different quality (i.e., body size) would also depend on food availability, and we here explore the effect of experimental food supply in begging success of nestlings and in provisioning of female hoopoes (Upupa epops), a species with extreme hatching asynchrony and nestlings size hierarchy. We video-recorded food allocation of females, begging success of nestlings of different size, and the social context (i.e., the size category of the other nestlings that were begging for food) during periods when experimental food supply was or was not available in the same nests. We found that

SUBMITTER: Ferrer-Pereira P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10636730 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Nov-Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature