Incubation Feeding and Nest Attentiveness in a Socially Monogamous Songbird: Role of Feather Colouration, Territory Quality and Ambient Environment
Parental investment and environmental conditions determine reproductive success in wild-ranging animals. Parental effort during incubation, and consequently factors driving it, has profound consequences for reproductive success in birds. The female nutrition hypothesis states that high male feeding enables the incubating female to spend more time on eggs, which can lead to higher hatching success. Moreover, […]
Fortune favours the aggressive: territory quality and behavioural syndromes in song sparrows, Melospiza melodia
While the relationship between aggression and resource value in competitions for discrete resources is well established, the relationship between aggression and territory quality is less well understood. Territoriality imposes spatial structure on social interactions: if spatial heterogeneity in habitat quality leads to clustering of high- and low-quality territories, and if consistently more aggressive individuals are […]