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The oxidative costs of parental care in cooperative and pair-breeding African starlings

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Abstract

The cost of parental care has long been thought to favor the evolution of cooperative breeding, because breeders can provide reduced parental care when aided by alloparents. Oxidative stress—the imbalance between reactive oxygen species and neutralizing antioxidants—has been proposed to mediate the cost of parental care, though results from empirical studies remain equivocal. We measured changes in oxidative status during reproduction in cooperatively breeding superb starlings (Lamprotornis superbus) to gain insight into the relationships among breeding status, parental care, and oxidative stress. We also compared the oxidative cost of reproduction in the cooperatively breeding superb starling to that in a sympatric non-cooperatively breeding species, the greater blue-eared glossy starling (L. chalybaeus), to determine whether cooperatively breeding individuals face reduced oxidative costs of parental care relative to non-cooperatively breeding individuals. Breeders and alloparents of the cooperative species did not differ in oxidative status throughout a breeding attempt. However, individuals of the non-cooperative species incurred an increase in reactive oxygen metabolites proportionally to an individual’s workload during offspring care. These findings suggest that non-cooperative starlings experience an oxidative cost of parental care, whereas cooperatively breeding starlings do not. It is possible that high nest predation risk and multi-brooding in the cooperatively breeding species may have favored reduced physiological costs of parental care more strongly compared to pair-breeding starlings. Reduced physiological costs of caring for young may thus represent a direct benefit that promotes cooperative breeding.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to W. Watetu, G. Manyaas, and most of all J. Mosiany for their assistance in the field. We also thank T. Williams and two anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. We acknowledge Kenya’s National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation, Kenya’s National Environmental Management Authority, the Kenya Wildlife Service, the National Museums of Kenya, and the Mpala Research Centre for enabling this work. S.G.-P was supported by the US National Science Foundation (IOS-1501257), the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Animal Behavior Society, and Columbia University. D.R.R. was supported by the US National Science Foundation (IOS-1121435, IOS-1257530, and IOS-1439985).

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SG-P and DRR conceived and designed the study, SG-P collected and analyzed the data, and SG-P and DRR wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Sarah Guindre-Parker.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Communicated by Michael Sheriff.

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Guindre-Parker, S., Rubenstein, D.R. The oxidative costs of parental care in cooperative and pair-breeding African starlings. Oecologia 188, 53–63 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-018-4178-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-018-4178-3

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