The early maternal environment shapes the parental response to offspring UV ornamentation.

ABSTRACT: Parents allocate resources to offspring to increase their survival and to maximize their own fitness, while this investment implies costs to their condition and future reproduction. Parents are hence expected to optimally allocate their resources. They should invest equally in all their offspring under good conditions, but when parental capacity is limited, parents should invest in the offspring with the highest probability of survival. Such parental favouritism is facilitated by the fact that offspring have evolved condition-dependent traits to signal their quality to parents. In this study we explore whether the parental response to an offspring quality signal depends on the intrinsic capacity of the parents, here the female. We first manipulated the intrinsic capacity of blue tit (Cyani

SUBMITTER: Garcia-Campa J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8531375 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature