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Providing parental care entails variable mating opportunity costs for male Temminck’s stints

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Abstract

Males of many species theoretically face a fitness tradeoff between mating and parental effort, but quantification of this is rare. We estimated the magnitude of the mating opportunity cost paid by incubating male Temminck’s stints (Calidris temminckii), taking advantage of uniparental care provided by both sexes in this species. “Incubating males” provide all care for an early clutch, limiting subsequent mating possibilities. “Non-incubating” males include males that failed to obtain, lost to predation, or actively avoided incubating clutches. These males were free to pursue extrapair copulations and to mate with females laying later clutches, which females usually incubate themselves. Male incubation classes did not differ in measures of quality, and many individuals changed classes between years, suggesting the use of conditional reproductive tactics. However, specialist non-incubators may also exist. Using microsatellites to assign parentage, we compare males’ total fertilizations and the subset “free of care” fertilizations between incubation classes. Incubators were more likely to gain at least one fertilization per season and averaged one more per season than non-incubators. However, successful non-incubators were more likely to gain “free of care” fertilizations, averaging two more than successful incubators. The relative success of male incubation classes also changed with local sex ratios. With higher female proportions, non-incubators gained disproportionately more offspring, suggesting that the use of tactics should be partly determined by the availability of potentially incubating females. Overall, we estimate the opportunity cost of incubating to be 13–25 % of the potential annual reproductive output.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Aappo Luukkonen and Riku Halmeenpää for help in the field. DMT thanks Sandy Talbot, Kevin Sage, and Judy Gust for their patience and help in the US Geological Survey, Alaska Science Center lab. David Westneat and two anonymous reviewers provided constructive feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. This study was supported by the USGS Alaska Science Center, the National Science and Engineering Council of Canada (to DBL), the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Kone Foundation, Emil Aaltonen Foundation (to VMP), the Finnish Environment Centre, and the Academy of Finland (project 128384 to KK; project 138049 to RLT).

Ethical standards

This study complied with the current laws of Finland. The ringing of birds was done under permit from the Finnish Museum of Natural History. Blood sampling and disturbance of a breeding birds was approved by the Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment in North Ostrobothnia, Finland (Dnro 1101L0353-254 and PPO-2006-L-206-254).

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  1. Robert L. Thomson

    Present address: Section of Ecology, Department of Biology, University of Turku, 20014, Turku, Finland

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, University of Oulu, P.O. Box 3000, 90014, Oulu, Finland

    Robert L. Thomson, Veli-Matti Pakanen, Laura Kvist, Antti Rönkä & Kari Koivula

  2. PO Box 82227, Fairbanks, AK, 99708, USA

    Diane M. Tracy

  3. Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada, V5A 1S6

    David B. Lank

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Correspondence to Robert L. Thomson.

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Communicated by C. R. Brown

Robert L. Thomson and Veli-Matti Pakanen joint first authors with equal contributions to this manuscript.

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Thomson, R.L., Pakanen, VM., Tracy, D.M. et al. Providing parental care entails variable mating opportunity costs for male Temminck’s stints. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 68, 1261–1272 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-014-1737-4

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