Incubation Behavior Differences in Urban and Rural House Wrens, Troglodytes aedon

Jennifer J Heppner,Jenny Q Ouyang

doi:10.3389/fevo.2021.590069

Abstract

As global land surfaces are being converted to urban areas at an alarming rate, understanding how individuals respond to urbanization is a key focus for behavioral ecology. As a critical component of avian parental care, incubating adults face a tradeoff between maintaining an optimal thermal environment for the developing embryos while meeting their own energetic demands. Urban habitats are biotically and abiotically different from their rural counterparts,i.e., in food availability, predator compositions, and the thermal environment. Therefore, urban birds may face different incubation challenges than their natural counterparts. We measured incubation behavior of rural and urban house wrens,Troglodytes aedon, with temperature loggers throughout the 12-day period. We found that urban females had more incubation bouts of shorter duration and spent less total time incubating per day than rural females. Results could provide evidence of behavioral shifts of wrens in cities, which have implications for the evolution of parental care. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the behavioral traits needed for city life and possible environmental pressures driving urban adaptations.

Highlights

The growth and spread of urban areas is one of the most extensive of all anthropogenic effects (Johnson and Munshi-South, 2017)
We measured incubation behavior of urban and rural house wrens to determine whether differences in the urban environment influenced parental behavior during incubation
We found that urban females had more and shorter daily incubation bouts leading to less total time spent incubating eggs over the entire incubation period

Summary

Introduction

The growth and spread of urban areas is one of the most extensive of all anthropogenic effects (Johnson and Munshi-South, 2017). Urban environments present a unique set of challenges to wildlife which have led to changes in wildlife behavior, physiology, morphology, and fitness (Hall and Warner, 2018; Ouyang et al, 2019; Reynolds et al, 2019). Some species continue to colonize and thrive in urban environments (urban exploiters; Sepp et al, 2018). Understanding how and why urban exploiters thrive in urban environments is a major goal in evolutionary ecology (Ouyang et al, 2018). Avian systems are ideal to study effects of urbanization, as their behavior is observed, they readily colonize new habitats, and can act as bioindicators of urban pollutants (Bonier et al, 2007; Zhang and Ma, 2011; Sol et al, 2013; Marzluff, 2017)

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