Detectability matters: conspicuous nestling mouth colours make prey transfer easier for parents in a cavity nesting bird.

ABSTRACT: An often underappreciated function of signals is to notify receivers of the presence and position of senders. The colours that ornament the mouthparts of nestling birds, for example, have been hypothesized to evolve via selective pressure generated by parents' inability to efficiently detect and feed nestlings without such visually conspicuous targets. This proposed mechanism has primarily been evaluated with comparative studies and experimental tests for parental allocation bias, leaving untested the central assumption of this detectability hypothesis, that provisioning offspring is a visually challenging task for avian parents and conspicuous mouths help. To test this assumption, I manipulated the mouths of nestling house sparrows to appear minimally and maximally conspicuous, and quanti

SUBMITTER: Dugas MB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4685542 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature