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  • Sexual conflict over parental care: can alternation lead to different prey selectivity?
    Curk, Teja
    In biparental care the two partners negotiate over parental investment and because they share the fitness benefits gained through their common offspring, but do not share the costs of the partner%s ... effort, is each selected to leave larger share of workload to its partner. When provisioning the offspring, a parent might adjust its effort of prey size delivered according to whether its partner was the last visited the nest (alternated visit) or itself was the last visited the nest (non-alternated visit). Because alternated visit brings twofold benefit of energetic prey and partner%s response, and non alternated visit brings only benefit of energetic prey we predict that parents deliver on average smaller prey in alternated visits compared to non-alternated visits. The aim of this study was therefore to assess whether parents deliver different prey sizes in alternated and non-alternated visit. To examine this behavior, provisioning visits of great tit (Parus major) parents were monitored with an automatic camera and prey sizes between alternated and non-alternated visits were compared. Prey sizes were estimated from the resulting images using an object from the image to set the scale in ImageJ program and were corrected for the distance from the camera. The results demonstrated that prey size was larger in alternated than in non-alternated visits, which was in contrast to our hypothesis. Such result might be caused by other factors hidden behind this mechanism such as prey distribution in the environment, different foraging strategies, and pair coordination of the foraging activity. However, further studies are needed to better understand foraging patterns and prey selectivity of the parents involved in biparental care.
    Type of material - master's thesis ; adult, serious
    Publication and manufacture - Utrecht : [T. Curk], 2015
    Language - english
    COBISS.SI-ID - 16385027

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