The parents' phenotype, or the environment they create for their young, can have long-lasting effects on their offspring, with profound evolutionary consequences. Yet virtually no work has considered how such parental effects might change the adaptive value of behavioural traits expressed by offspring upon reaching adulthood. To address this problem, we combined experiments on burying beetles (Nicrophorus vespilloides) with theoretical modelling, and focussed on one adult behavioural trait in particular: the supply of parental care....

Decades of research have shown that the coevolutionary arms race between avian brood parasites and their hosts can promote phenotypic diversification in hosts and brood parasites. However, relatively little is known about the role of brood parasitism in promoting phenotypic diversification of nestlings. We review field data collected over four decades in Australia, New Caledonia and New Zealand to assess potential for coevolutionary interactions between the shining bronze-cuckoo (Chalcites lucidus) and its hosts, and how...

Microsatellite loci are widely used in population genetic studies, but the presence of null alleles may lead to biased results. Here, we assessed five methods that indirectly detect null alleles and found large inconsistencies among them. Our analysis was based on 20 microsatellite loci genotyped in a natural population of Microtus oeconomus sampled during 8 years, together with 1200 simulated populations without null alleles, but experiencing bottlenecks of varying duration and intensity, and 120 simulated...

Several factors can influence individual and group behavioral variation that can have important fitness consequences. In this study, we tested how two habitat types (semi-natural meadows and meadows invaded by Solidago plants) and factors like colony and worker size and nest density influence behavioral (activity, meanderness, exploration, aggression, nest displacement) variation on different levels of the social organization of Myrmica rubra ants and how these might affect the colony productivity. We assumed that the factors...

When encountering liquid food sources, ants of the genus Aphaenogaster drop various materials as tools into the food, and then carry the food-soaked tools back to the nest. Although this is one of the most well-documented examples of tool use in insects, we know little about which factors influence their choice of tools during foraging. Here, we investigated the tool-using behavior of Aphaenogaster subterranea by examining, across a range of settings, how tool-using workers deal...

Our dataset, Nest Monitoring of the Kagu, consists of around ten days (253 hours) of continuous monitoring sampled at 25 frames per second. Our proposed dataset aims to facilitate computer vision research that relates to event detection and localization. We fully annotated the entire dataset (23M frames) with spatial localization labels in the form of a tight bounding box. Additionally, we provide temporal event segmentation labels of five unique bird activities: Feeding, Pushing leaves, Throwing...

Telomeres have recently been suggested to play important role in ageing and are considered to be a reliable ageing biomarkers. The life history theory predicts that costs of reproduction should be expressed in terms of accelerated senescence, and some empirical studies do confirm such presumption. Thus, a link between reproductive effort and telomere dynamics should be anticipated. Recent studies have indeed demonstrated that reproduction may trigger telomere loss, but actual impact of reproductive effort has...

The partitioning of reproduction among individuals in communally breeding animals varies greatly among species, from the monopolization of reproduction (high reproductive skew) to similar contribution to the offspring in others (low skew). Reproductive skew models explain how relatedness or ecological constraints affect the magnitude of reproductive skew. They typically assume that individuals are capable of flexibly reacting to social and environmental changes. Most models predict a decrease of skew when benefits of staying in the...

Animal personality traits are defined as consistent individual differences in behavior over time and across contexts. Occasionally this inflexibility results in maladaptive behavioral responses to external stimuli. However, in social groups inflexible behavioral phenotypes might be favored as this could lead to more predictable social interactions. Two hypotheses seek to describe the optimal distribution of personality types within groups. The social niche specialization hypothesis states that individuals within groups should partition social roles, like personality...

Drainage of wetlands and agricultural intensification has resulted in serious biodiversity loss in Europe, not least in grasslands. Consequently, many meadow birds have drastically declined, and the habitats they select for breeding currently rely on land management. However, the selection of habitats maintained by agriculture may contribute to reduced fitness and thus remain maladaptive for individuals, which makes conservation challenging. An understanding of the relationships between species’ habitat selection, food supply and land management in...

Haldane’s rule predicts that particularly high fitness reduction should affect the heterogametic sex of interspecific hybrids. Despite the fact that hybridization is widespread in birds, survival of hybrid individuals is rarely addressed in studies of avian hybrid zones, possibly because of methodological constraints. Here, having applied capture-mark-recapture models to an extensive, 19-year-long dataset on individually marked birds, we estimate annual survival rates of hybrid individuals in the hybrid zone between herring (Larus argentatus) and Caspian...

Although a large part of the global domestic dog population is free-ranging and free-breeding, knowledge of genetic diversity in these free-breeding dogs (FBDs) and their ancestry relations to pure-breed dogs is limited, and the indigenous status of FBDs in Asia is still uncertain. We analyse genome-wide SNP variability of FBDs across Eurasia, and show that they display weak genetic structure and are genetically distinct from pure-breed dogs rather than constituting an admixture of breeds. Our...

Several hypotheses predict that the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) drives mating preference in females. Olfactory, color or morphological traits are often found as reliable signals of the MHC profile, but the role of avian song mediating MHC-based female choice remains largely unexplored. We investigated the relationship between several MHC and acoustic features in the collared flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis) a European passerine with complex songs. We screened a fragment of the class IIB 2nd exon of...

Coexistence between great tits Parus major and blue tits Cyanistes caeruleus, but also other hole‐nesting taxa, constitutes a classic example of species co‐occurrence resulting in potential interference and exploitation competition for food and for breeding and roosting sites. However, the spatial and temporal variations in coexistence and its consequences for competition remain poorly understood. We used an extensive database on reproduction in nest boxes by great and blue tits based on 87 study plots across...

Null alleles are alleles that for various reasons fail to amplify in a PCR assay. The presence of null alleles in microsatellite data is known to bias the genetic parameter estimates. Thus, efficient detection of null alleles is crucial, but the methods available for indirect null allele detection return inconsistent results. Here, our aim was to compare different methods for null allele detection, to explain their respective performance and to provide improvements. We applied several...

Parasites are ubiquitous in the wild and by imposing fitness costs on their hosts they constitute an important selection factor. One of the most common parasites of wild birds are Plasmodium and Haemoproteus, protozoans inhabiting the blood, which cause avian malaria and malaria-like disease, respectively. Although they are expected to cause negative effects in infected individuals, in many cases studies in natural populations failed to detect such effect. Using data from seven breeding seasons (2008...

We tested whether the early-life environment can influence the extent of individual plasticity in a life history trait. We asked: can the early-life environment explain why, in response to the same adult environmental cue, some individuals invest more than others in current reproduction? And can it additionally explain why investment in current reproduction trades off against survival in some individuals, but is positively correlated with survival in others? We addressed these questions using the burying...

Hypotheses postulating parasite-mediated mate choice intrinsically assume that parasitic infections deteriorate the quality of male ornamentation. Although this assumption has often been studied in the context of carotenoid-based colouration, only few studies investigated this with reference to structural feather colouration, which in many species plays a vital role in sexual selection. Here, using a three-years dataset from a wild blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) population, we examined the relationship between the haemosporidian infection status and the...

1. The use of a drone to count the flock sizes of 33 species of waterbirds during the breeding and non-breeding periods was investigated. 2. In 96% of 343 cases, drone counting was successful. 18.8% of non-breeding birds and 3.6% of breeding birds exhibited adverse reactions: the former birds were flushed, whereas the latter attempted to attack the drone. 3. The automatic counting of birds was best done with ImageJ/Fiji microbiology software – the average...

The file Panagiotopoulou_etal_Abaerii_sex_markers_RNAseq_search.bz2 contains results of RNAseq analyses of the female and male transcriptomes of Siberian Sturgeon (Acipenser baerii). Total RNAs were isolated from fin tissues and subjected to Whole Transcriptome Sequencing (WTS) on Illumina platform. Compressed file contains assemblies of the sequences, their annotations and results of the differential expression analyses of the two transcriptomes representing both sexes. Files were designated respectively to the origin of RNAs (female sequences are in files containing in...