Plan ahead, or wing it? How storm-petrel parents adjust food delivery to young chicks.

ABSTRACT: Parents must decide how to allocate energy gained from foraging between self and offspring. Storm-petrels (Procellariiformes: Hydrobatidae) are pelagic seabirds that travel hundreds of kilometers across multiple days before returning to the nesting burrow to feed a dependent chick. Parents return to the nest with food stored in the proventriculus, a portion of which is regurgitated to their offspring. As the chick grows, provisioning demands increase. However, it is unknown whether parents meet this increasing demand by (1) altering their foraging strategies to acquire more food or (2) allocating a greater proportion of their intake to the chick. We designed, validated, and implemented a new technology-the Burrow Scale Monitor-to measure Leach's storm-petrels (Hydrobates leucorhous)

SUBMITTER: Mauck RA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12636516 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov-Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature