Home range size and habitat quality affect breeding success but not parental investment in barn owl males.

ABSTRACT: Life-history theory predicts that parents should balance their limited resources to maximize lifetime fitness, limiting their investment in current reproduction when the fitness value of current progeny is lower than that gained by producing offspring in the future. Here, we examined whether male barn owls (Tyto alba) breeding in low-quality habitats increased their parental effort to successfully complete offspring rearing or limited their investment by paying a fitness cost while saving energy for the future. We equipped 128 males with GPS devices between 2016 and 2020 to collect information on home range size, habitat composition, food provisioning rate to the brood and nightly distances covered. We also recorded nestlings' growth and survival, as well as males' body mass variation and

SUBMITTER: Sechaud R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9021228 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature