We found that the foraging behaviour of great tit parents is highly coordinated in space and time, with parents changing their foraging locations in conjunction with their partners’ movements. This allowed us to remotely monitor and collect undisturbed data of great tit foraging movements in their natural settings. We placed receivers in a grid in the territory around the nest to triangulate the location of both parents during their provisioning activity. These tags are worn like a small backpack and transmit a radio pulse every 5 seconds, which is logged by small portable receivers. When chicks have hatched and are being fed, we captured parents at the nest and tagged them with a small-radio receiver. In this study, we monitored great tit reproduction in a woodland forest in the Netherlands during their breeding season. Great tit parents can visit the nest to feed the chicks once every 2 minutes and keep up with this rhythm for about 15-20 days until chicks fledge. Once chicks hatch, parents feed them with caterpillars and insects found in the territory near the nest. Passerine birds, such as great tits, are hard working parents. Its breeding ecology has been studied for more than 50 years and it has become a model species to study parental care in the wild. The great tit is a small passerine bird commonly breeding in European forests. In a recent paper in the Journal of Animal Ecology, we explored offspring provisioning behaviour of great tit ( Parus major) pairs and investigated how parents coordinate their foraging movements. To reduce the cost of parental conflict, researchers also point out that parents should constantly monitor each other and coordinate their activity, but we lack a clear understanding of the mechanisms by which parental coordination can occur. Decades of research have suggested that parents do not work at their maximum capacity, and because of that, offspring and parents could suffer reduced fitness. This desire generates a conflict of interest between the parents, commonly known as sexual conflict. That is why each parent would like, if possible, to slack off and make its partner work harder. It takes a considerable amount of time and energy to successfully raise offspring. This blog post is provided by Davide Baldan and tells the #StoryBehindThePaper for the paper “ Songbird parents coordinate offspring provisioning at fine spatio-temporal scales“, which was recently published in the Journal of Animal Ecology.īeing a parent is certainly not an easy job.
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