The impact of increased food availability on reproduction in a long-distance migratory songbird: Implications for environmental change?

Seward, Adam M., Beale, Colin M., Gilbert, Lucy, Jones, T. Hefin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7874-3627 and Thomas, Robert J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5256-3313 2014. The impact of increased food availability on reproduction in a long-distance migratory songbird: Implications for environmental change? PLoS ONE 9 (10) , e111180. 10.1371/journal.pone.0111180

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (433kB) | Preview

Abstract

Many populations of migratory songbirds are declining or shifting in distribution. This is likely due to environmental changes that alter factors such as food availability that may have an impact on survival and/or breeding success. We tested the impact of experimentally supplemented food on the breeding success over three years of northern wheatears (Oenanthe oenanthe), a species in decline over much of Europe. The number of offspring fledged over the season was higher for food-supplemented birds than for control birds. The mechanisms for this effect were that food supplementation advanced breeding date, which, together with increased resources, allowed further breeding attempts. While food supplementation did not increase the clutch size, hatching success or number of chicks fledged per breeding attempt, it did increase chick size in one year of the study. The increased breeding success was greater for males than females; males could attempt to rear simultaneous broods with multiple females as well as attempting second broods, whereas females could only increase their breeding effort via second broods. Multiple brooding is rare in the study population, but this study demonstrates the potential for changes in food availability to affect wheatear breeding productivity, primarily via phenotypic flexibility in the number of breeding attempts. Our results have implications for our understanding of how wheatears may respond to natural changes in food availability due to climate changes or changes in habitat management.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Biosciences
Subjects:	Q Science > QL Zoology
Additional Information:	This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Publisher:	Public Library of Science
ISSN:	1932-6203
Funders:	NERC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Date of Acceptance:	29 September 2014
Last Modified:	23 May 2023 22:48
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/66269

Citation Data

Cited 10 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item