Songbird parents coordinate offspring provisioning at fine spatio-temporal scales.

ABSTRACT: For parents, rearing offspring together is far from a purely cooperative exercise, as a conflict of interest ('sexual conflict') exists over their optimum level of care. Recent theory emphasizes that sexual conflict can be evolutionarily resolved, and complete parental cooperation can occur, if parents directly respond ('negotiate') to each other and coordinate their level of care. Despite numerous experiments showing that parents are responsive to each other, we still lack empirical evidence of the behavioural mechanisms by which this negotiation occurs. In this study, we investigated the spatio-temporal coordination of parental provisioning behaviour as a possible mechanism of negotiation over parental care. We deployed an automated radiotracking technology to track the provisioning acti

SUBMITTER: Baldan D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9321892 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature