Abstract
Parental care increases parental fitness through improved offspring condition and survival but comes at a cost for the caretaker(s). To increase life‐time fitness, caring parents are, therefore, expected to adjust their reproductive investment to current environmental conditions and parental capacities. The latter is thought to be signaled via ornamental traits of the bearer. We here investigated whether pre‐ and/or posthatching investment of blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) parents was related to ornamental plumage traits (UV crown coloration and carotenoid‐based plumage coloration) expressed by either the individual itself (i.e. “good parent hypothesis”) or its partner (i.e. “differential allocation hypothesis”). Our results show that neither prehatching (that is clutch size and offspring begging intensity) nor posthatching parental investment (provisioning rate, offspring body condition at fledging) was related to an individual's UV crown coloration or to that of its partner. Similar observations were made for carotenoid‐based plumage coloration, except for a consistent positive relationship between offspring begging intensity and maternal carotenoid‐based plumage coloration. This sex‐specific pattern likely reflects a maternal effect mediated via maternally derived egg substances, given that the relationship persisted when offspring were cross‐fostered. This suggests that females adjust their offspring's phenotype toward own phenotype, which may facilitate in particular mother‐offspring co‐adaptation. Overall, our results contribute to the current state of evidence that structural or pigment‐based plumage coloration of blue tits are inconsistently correlated with central life‐history traits.
Highlights
Parental care is a widespread behavior within the animal kingdom, because it increases parental fitness through improved offspring condition and survival (Clutton-Brock 1991; Ko€lliker et al 2012)
We investigated whether the pre- and/or posthatching parental investment of blue tits was related to ornamental plumage traits, expressed by either the individual itself or its partner
We investigated the relationship between blue tit plumage coloration and parental investment – stimulated by previously reported intriguing patterns of parental investment adjusted to partner UV crown coloration
Summary
Parental care is a widespread behavior within the animal kingdom, because it increases parental fitness through improved offspring condition and survival (Clutton-Brock 1991; Ko€lliker et al 2012). It has been hypothesized that this can be done based on the expression of (conspicuous) ornamental traits, which are costly to produce or maintain and should be honest signals of quality (Zahavi 1975; Hamilton and Zuk 1982; Andersson 1986) These considerations were originally employed to explain conspicuous male ornaments (such as a peacock’s tail fan) (Zahavi 1975), but females may show conditiondependent phenotypic traits, which may play a role in mate choice and female competition (Amundsen 2000; Kraaijeveld et al 2007; Clutton-Brock 2009). One may expect to find a positive relationship between an individual’s ornament and the amount of care it provides
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